Built too frail: Why your data governance initiative wasn’t going to work anyway
Everyone knows data governance is crucial. Everyone knows data quality must get better. So why are they all sitting around pointing fingers at IT?
Historical role bias
Ninety-five percent of professionals think data governance is important. Fifty-two percent say it’s critical. But very few plan to do much about it.
Sixty-three percent of organizations still don’t have a dedicated data compliance budget and 46 percent lack a formal strategy. At 40 percent of companies, everyone expects IT to foot the whole data governance bill, as well as come up with the plan.
At 40 percent of companies, everyone expects IT to foot the whole data governance bill, as well as come up with the plan.
This is while business units like marketing have spent decades wrestling budgetary and decision-making authority for cloud services away from IT. Buying committees got bigger because everyone wanted a say. Now that we’ve gotten to the un-fun part of owning data, many leaders are shrinking back.
But whoever is reliant on the data flow should be culpable. Sales teams need it ( 40 percent say they’re seriously impaired without it ), marketing teams need it ( 45 percent now employ data scientists ), success teams need it, finance teams need it, product teams need it, and business teams need it. And today, with the ubiquity of cloud connectors and rapid system configuration, almost all of them have a hand it making it worse.
And all of this might lead you, like many, to believe that a new tool is the answer.
CDP to the rescue, right?
“Like unicorns and yetis, the elusive single unified view of the customer is easier found in dreams than in reality.” — Gartner
A company that goes out and buys a CDP tool now in anticipation of January 1 will likely be disappointed because the whole idea is built on a false premise: That you need to move your data to yet another platform, operate on the data, and move it back. With small data sets, this is possible. With medium to large datasets, it creates a cloud connector cabling nightmare that causes more problems than it solves.
To achieve improved data quality and governance, you need central control, but control that seeps into the systems themselves, and governs it where it’s created. We need a platform to perform the CDP function, only directly on the data, in a code-free way that everyone in the business can view and agree to, under IT’s aegis.
What’s also needed is the other hard thing: A serious conversation where all departments admit their responsibility for data quality and agree to work with IT to manage up while IT manages down. Already, there are promising signs that this sort of cooperation is happening.
In last year, half of the North American marketers said that centralizing data control was the most important thing their organization could do to get more value out of it. Experian also found that 91 percent of C-level executives thought the business was just as culpable as IT.
I say we need to go even further: We need to rebrand ‘data governance’ itself, which was never going to work with present CDPs or cross-functional disorganization anyway, to be about data quality and integrity, which everyone can actually get behind.
About the author: is a CEO, founder, and author with 25 years of experience in tech who writes about data ecosystems, SaaS, and product development. He spent nearly seven years as EVP of Product at Marketo and is now CEO and founder of Syncari.
Originally published at https://syncari.com on August 13, 2019.
