Data governance is a process focused on managing the quality, consistency, usability, security and availability of information. Business Intelligence (BI) Governance incorporates the guiding principles, decision-making concerns and oversight procedures to ensure strong data governance for ongoing relevance and accuracy of a company’s BI solutions.
The objectives of BI Governance are:
- Program planning, prioritization and funding processes.
- Architecture Stewardship to support architectural policies and standards.
- Data Stewardship to ensure quality, consistency and integration.
- Business Change Management.
Benefits of BI Governance
Good BI Governance means significant business benefits for meeting corporate objectives:
- Generating greater ROI
For any significant project that couples IT and business requirements, the return will be relative to the overall governance policies established the stronger the governance, the greater the return. This is because governance processes monitor effectiveness, reduce ongoing maintenance and support time and costs and provide the fastest path to resolution when business or technical requirement change.
- Tight coupling of Business and IT needs
BI solutions that follow good BI Governance principles start with input from business experts and then use that input as the foundation for working with the IT organization to architect and design the BI roadmap. They also incorporate oversight mechanisms to ensure continuous feedback from processes that creates an ongoing interlinked cycle between business and IT, thus helping to balance business and IT value models.
- Establishing consistent and transparent processes
A goal of BI Governance is clearly defining how work gets done and measured. Stakeholders understand the process, how to communicate their needs and issues and how to prioritize tasks and ensure decisions are made quickly.
Infogain's BI Governance Model
- Organization Priorities
- Budget
- Project ROI
- Infrastructure Capacity
- Team expertise
- People availability
- Structural redundancy analysis
- Datamart rationalization
- Databases and schemas
- Performance (Load and
access) efficiency
- Penetration of BI
- Build trust and reliance
- Business process change
- Cultural transformation
- Roles and responsibilities
- Data definitions and
taxonomies
- Data quality and consistency
- Data integration technology
selection
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Project Prioritization
To help integrate BI into all IT programs, BI Governance is used to aid prioritizing BI requests along different criteria such as:
- Project ROI
- Organizational Budget
- Internal Expertise Available
- Project Resource Availability
- IT Infrastructure Capacity
- Enterprise Strategic Value.
Architecture Stewardship
An Architecture Stewardship program for BI Governance is established to:
- Ensure consistent data definitions
- Support architectural policies and standards
- Support Metadata Programs, SOA, Master Data Management (MDM), Enterprise Data Management (EDM)
- Bring cross-functional attention to integration challenges
- Identify stakeholders, establish decision rights, clarify accountability
Data Stewardship
The primary goal of a data stewardship program is to provide the enterprise with legible, consistent, accurate, documented and timely information about its data resources. Stewardship also ensures that authorized individuals use corporate data correctly and to its fullest potential.
Data Stewards are responsible for the following:
- Standard Business Naming Standards
- Standard Entity Definitions
- Standard Attribute Definitions
- Business Rules Specification
- Standard Calculation and Summarization Definitions
- Entity and Attribute Aliases
- Data Quality Analyses
- Sources of Data for the Data Warehouse
- Data Security Specification
- Data Retention Criteria
Business Change Management
BI Governance establishes proper Change Management (CM) and Training policies that facilitate the user adoption process and promote the overall use of BI across the business user community. Governance focused on change management guides business users to trust the information from their BI solutions and to understand the ultimate business value provided by knowledge optimization. As these business users grow to depend on the BI knowledge, they will work to:
- Build trust and reliance on the BI solutions across the company
- Further entrench the penetration of BI across the enterprise
- Promote needed business process changes to support ongoing BI initiatives
- Enable a cultural transformation that leverages business intelligence for all high-value activities
- Define ongoing roles and responsibilities to ensure the success of BI.
Contact us to learn more or to discuss your Business Intelligence requirements. |
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