Information Governance in a World of Big Data
Organizations need to evolve the governance of their information assets and respond to the opportunities and challenges brought by the mega trends of Big Data, Cloud, the Internet of Things, Mobile and Social Networking.
Information governance already exists in most large organizations and has different, often unconnected, focal points, for example Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Master Data Management (MDM) and Data Warehousing. This White Paper discusses the current state of information governance, the new challenges and makes recommendations for what organizations need to do to succeed in the world of Big Data.
Key Findings
The Internet of Things, Mobile, Open Data and Social Networking are creating a Big Data tsunami
There are significant opportunities to create new business value by monetizing Big Data assets, but there are also new information governance challenges
Information governance has multiple, different, focal points. For some it’s about librarianship and curation. For others, it is about creating a best version of the “truth”.
There is active data governance in the operational world of MDM and applications and mostly passive data governance in the analytical world of data warehousing.
The “3Vs” of Big Data and new database technologies are driving major changes in the analytical environment.
The ability to leverage to Big Data will depend on being able to leverage quality master data – potentially in real time
Key Recommendations
Extend existing information governance regimes and blend them with new ways of working and thinking, plus the use of new technologies and new levels of automation.
Prioritize your information governance resources on information that has enterprise level impact. Leverage master data more widely across both the operational environment and the analytical environments.
Start assigning trust levels to your data and leveraging data relative to its trust level. You can’t actively govern everything. You don’t control everything, it doesn’t make economic sense to try to govern everything and you probably wouldn’t be able to keep up anyway.
Bring privacy and security management together with information governance. Information is not only an asset that has value; it is also a risk to the organization.
Appoint a business oriented Chief Data Officer (CDO) to play a leading role in leveraging data to create business value, and also play a leading role in governing that data.
Maintain your focus on MDM to fully leverage the Big Data opportunity.