By Jim Orr, Director, Enterprise Data Strategy, Harte-Hanks Trillium Software
In June I spoke in San Diego at the Data Governance Conference, which by the way is a real good event for those of you that are serious about the discipline. During one of the sessions I participated in I mentioned the relative immaturity of the data governance industry which to my surprise offended at least one person in the audience.
Seems there are those that have lived and breathed data governance for some time and those that have not. The individual I appeared to have offended was one of those professionals that had obviously been working in this space for some time and was probably very good at what they do. Unfortunately this is not the norm by any means nor is it what I witness as I interact with companies around the globe.
What I do see is a large number of companies struggling because they either don’t have a data governance program (vast majority), have a disjointed program that is not working, have a program that is not nearly as good as they tout, or have a program that barely scratches the surface of opportunity. At the same time I see a ground swell of interest in the subject matter with people wanting to learn as much as they can as fast as they can about it.
While interest is high budgets remain low in that most companies have not budgeted for this part of their project. In fact I’ll go out on a limb and estimate that over 90% of companies interested in data governance do not have a budget for it in their current or upcoming projects around data management (DW, MDM, CRM, CDH, etc.).
In addition, many companies are still trying to sort out what data governance is. To some it remains a technology, for others a mechanism to support standards development, and yet for others it is all about stewardship. Though the industry is starting to bring clarity to the definition (it’s actually all these things and more) it remains an anomaly to many companies.
To add to the confusion many technology companies are referring to their applications as data governance when in fact theses applications are simply supporting a process within the broader data governance arena.
Collectively these things point to an immature industry that is still very much in the awareness stage. However, the next 2-3 years should be an exciting time in the maturity of data governance as we should expect to see awareness transcend to budget which will give way to implementation of this dynamic discipline across the broader market.
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