Why Data Governance Agreement Matters to Data Analytics

Yet another report on the clash between the business and IT side of the house came out last week in the survey released by the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council (CGOC) on data retention and disposal. According to Information Management’s article on the survey, less than 25 percent of large corporations (Global 1000) can fully complete their data retention and disposal objectives.

The survey points to the age-old problem that different departments have different requirements for how they deal with data. Most often, the survey participants blamed old systems and lack of corporate support for a single method of governing data. 

Eight-five percent of companies think that working together to manage data is critical to success, but business, IT and even legal are still pointing fingers, according to the report.

This age-old problem affects your use of data for business decision-making because it’s arguments like these that keep projects such as an across-the-board BI strategy on hold. What’s even more startling about the disconnects in data governance is that “77 percent of companies’ schedules were not electronically usable or still relegated to paper documents.” And, this is causing these businesses to spend a significant portion of their revenue managing data that has “no legal, regulatory or business value.”

That money can be used for data analytics initiatives, for example, to make decisions that add to the revenue stream. In the Council’s press release on the report, Deidre Paknad, CGOC founder said the cost and risk of IT and the legal teams not getting on the same page about data governance are going to continue to rise as data volume rises.

Modernizing and agreeing on how to manage data is a step toward more fluid budgets and more money at the end of the day.

Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team

Image Credit: Microsoft Office Clip Art