Analysis

Who owns the data?

Philip Howard By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research
Published: 31st July 2009
Copyright Bloor Research © 2009
 Logo for Bloor Research

Before attempting to answer this question I'll say why it is important: it's important because if you don't know who owns data then you don't know who is responsible for it and you don't know who is going to manage it or ensure that it is of good quality. So, who owns the data?

The short answer to that question is the business. It can't be IT because they don't understand it, so it must be the business. But who in the business? And there's the rub. Who owns customer data? Finance, marketing, sales, the service department and probably others are all stakeholders but it's a turf war when it comes to deciding who actually owns (or disowns if stakeholders are averse to taking responsibility) the data.

Moreover, this issue applies more widely than you might think. At a casual glance you might think that HR data, for example, is strictly owned by HR. But what about badge number, user IDs, passwords and so on—aren't these owned by security, or maybe IT?

So, the bottom line is that the business can't decide who owns the data. And assuming that you do need someone to be responsible for the data then you are left with a conundrum: there isn't any structure in the organisation that supports ownership of data. And the only resolution of this issue is to create one: there needs to be a data ownership organisation that provides data governance in collaboration with the relevant business departments on the one hand and IT on the other.

This really isn't new but there is a neat parallelism here in terms of governance (and my thanks to Kalido here for pointing this out): the business is responsible for process governance, IT for systems governance and this separate structure in the middle for data governance.

However, this isn't the end of the story because there are couple of additional points. The first is that I said that nobody could decide who owns what data. That's not strictly true: IT owns its own data. IT understands and owns SLA metrics, database performance management details and so forth. It also understands and owns its own processes. Therefore IT governance encapsulates both process and data governance as they pertain to IT itself and I don't think that any separate structures are needed within IT unless the IT department is very large.

The second additional point is with respect to content. Here, the position is different. It is usually quite clear who owns web content, for example, because it is originated by a particular department. Does that mean that content governance should be treated separately from data governance? Well, it depends what we mean by content governance. If we mean the processes through which the content was created and is updated then that's essentially no different from the business process ownership already mentioned. However, if we mean content quality checking (no broken hyperlinks, compliance with accessibility regulations, ensuring that indexes, tags and classification data are kept up-to-date and so on) which are the sorts of capabilities that Vamosa has recently introduced, then we are getting much closer to the sort of thing that data governance does. You could probably argue it either way but my inclination is to think that it would make sense to fold this into the data governance structure, in which case the more correct term would be information governance.

Reader Comments

Sorry, we are no longer accepting comments on this item. We suggest trying to contact the author directly.

31st July 2009: 'Tony Ellis' said:

Philip enjoyed reading the article on a topic close to my heart. You might be interested in how a public sector group is trying to help local government get a grip on all the data it holds. Our group is called "Data Connects" and aim is to basically pass on our collective CDI/MDM knowledge. Our group output is freely available and can be found here
www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/capitalambition/projects/dataconnects.htm

Reply to Tony Ellis?

31st July 2009: 'Winston Chen' said:

Great piece, and I appreciate the mention of Kalido. While it may seem like a theoritical question, the answer of this question is the key to getting in front of data quality problems rather than chasing it all the time.

To add another bit of nuance to this topic, we also have to understand "authorship" and "impact". In other words, different business processes consume and produce the same piece of data. I just talked to a consumer good manufacturer. For the factory people, a key attribute is the height of a bottle without the cap. This attribute is needed to fill the bottle, before capping it. As you can imagine, getting it wrong would have some horrific consequences. So who owns this attribute? The person who authors it is the R&D person who designed the packaging. But the person who needs it the most is in manufacturing. One way to resolve this is for manufacturing to define data quality standards. And R&D needs to meet it, in a sort of SLA. And data governance provides the framework to support this.

Reply to Winston Chen?

1st August 2009: 'Chris Boorman' said:

Great article. You are totally correct that IT cannot own "business data" because (quite simply and as you correctly state) they don't understand it.

So we have an issue. The business owns the data, but the only way that the business traditionally sees the data is through business applications - and unfortunately they are swamped with multiple applications that all look at data in different ways. For many years IT has attempted to solve this by providing IT-oriented tools to the business. However, the business doesn’t understand the mumbo-jumbo terminology that IT uses, so such offerings continually fail to live up to expectations.

We need the business and IT to be able to collaborate more closely in understanding the data and enabling relevant stakeholders within the business to be able to manage their data. For too long the business user has been shut-out of their data which is locked away within disparate applications.

At Informatica we are working to evolve the technology platform to solve these issues. We will be releasing new capabilities like this as part of our new version 9 release. To facilitate IT business alignment, version 9 will empower business users with self-service, simple-to-use browser-based specification tools. Pervasive data quality services will improve the trustworthiness of all data throughout the data integration process; and open SOA based data services will enable even more types of operational data integration projects including data virtualization.

Reply to Chris Boorman?

18th August 2009: 'Stefan Andreasen' said:

Chris is spot on. The business know the data and work with the data, but they cannot IT to develiver them where they need them. At Kapow Technologies (www.kapowtech.com) we successfully solved this problem by allowing LOB to access the data through the web front end. Basically if you can see the data in a web data, you got the automated access, even without coding.

Reply to Stefan Andreasen?

5th August 2009: 'Ed Gillespie' said:

Was just reading an article by Navin Sharma at PBBI, which basically netted out that owning the data is everyone's business. Thoughtful piece, if interested. http://ebs.pbbiblogs.com/2009/08/03/data-governance-its-everbodys-business/

Reply to Ed Gillespie?

The messages above were all contributed by IT-Director.com readers. Whilst we take care to remove any posts deemed inappropriate, we can take no responsibility for these comments. If you would like a comment removed please contact our editorial team.