The Data Asset: How Smart Companies Govern Their Data for Business Success

CHAPTER 14

Reactive Organizations: Choose the Technology That Gets the Most from Your Applications

Life is like a piano . . . what you get out of it depends on how you play it.

—TOM LEHRER

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

Reactive organizations build on the data quality tools and processes in place to successfully use data warehouses, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Reactive companies need data quality, profiling, and identify resolution tools. But now they also need:

• Metadata exploration to analyze the “data about the data” to answer those questions before bringing bad, unreliable, or ill-suited data into a new system.

• Business rules monitoring (also known as data validation) to answer the question: Are the data quality initiatives focused on the intent of the data? Just as ERP or CRM is the first move toward centralized business processes, business rules monitoring is the first step towards a codified data governance program.

• Data reconciliation efforts to reconcile and resolve duplicate records across sources, preferably in near-real time. Data reconciliation often includes data quality, metadata tools, and other technologies.

REMEMBER

1. Data quality and data governance should never be considered a one-time project. A quality culture must be established as an ongoing, continuous process.

2. No organization can tackle enterprise-wide data quality and data governance all at once. To be successful, your journey must be evolutionary. ...