What Is Data Governance? Understanding the Business Impact

Chapter 2. The Benefits of Good Governance

A data-driven business is one that relies on facts—specifically, the facts found in its data—to support its decision-making processes. These include strategic decisions, such as acquiring a competitor or restructuring the business; tactical decisions, such as embedding data into business processes by using it in recommendation systems; and operational decisions, such as performing prescriptive maintenance on machines or making internal business processes more efficient.

The data-driven business sees data as an asset and a strategic resource and has a company culture that values data and sees maintaining its quality as crucial, as discussed in Chapter 1. All of these decisions rely on creating such a culture.

All of these decisions are only as good as the data that drives them, which means that data governance is at the core of the business. This takes us back to the quality principle from Chapter 1, often summarized as “garbage in, garbage out.” Good quality management and good processing lead to good data. Good data might not automatically result in good decisions, but it is a necessary condition for them; bad data will result in bad decisions. And good decisions lead to better performance, a better reputation, and better revenue.

A data-driven business culture is therefore one that values and invests in its data governance body. Let’s look at how this plays out in practice.

Risk Management

While data governance is important throughout ...