Here at Bonitasoft, we talk about the need for good corporate governance of business processes (and of course, how the Bonita platform can make that much easier enterprise-wide.)
Isaac Sacolick, author of Driving Digital, President and CIO of StarCIO, and author of the blog Social, Agile and Transformation, explains three ways to explain data governance. If you can get the CEO on Board with data governance, you have a much better chance of getting reluctant business leaders to invest their people’s time and focus on this important issue.
3 key suggestions to underscore the need for good data governance
1. Illustrate the Impacts of Poor Data Quality
Use data quality and trusting data as the primary rationale to help CEOs, Boards, and other business executives buy into data governance objectives.
“Today, value propositions and business models have moved to digital. The fuel for digital is data. And without trustworthy data, you lack the fuel to drive digital forward. And this house of cards is built on data governance. Data governance simply put ensures you have data which is great, and data which once refined is protected.”
-Myles Suer, Director at Alation
“We all say that our business decisions are based on information and KPIs, and data reliability is key to “going digital,” where we base automation of processes on well-defined business data models. That means good governance around data, and for example, keeping a protected master source of clean data is critical to making good business decisions.”
- Valentina Botnari, product owner at Bonitasoft
2. Focus on the Risks Around Data Retention Policies
Highlight the costs and risks of overly relying on manual, error-prone spreadsheets.
“CEOs need to understand that data and data governance are at the heart of every company. By not properly governing your data, you’re putting your company and your customers at risk as well as exposing yourself to significant legal risk.”
- Bob David, CMO at Plutora
3. Never Waste a Crisis - Use Public Failures to Sell Data Security
Business leaders should be informed on how data and security impact other businesses. This may be the spark to bump data governance and security investments, but CIOs, CDOs, and CISOs must relate the opportunities and risks to their business to drive a sustainable program.
"Attackers use automation and AI technologies to find and exploit vulnerabilities in cloud environments to gain access to data. Implementing effective data governance that includes deploying automation technologies to keep cloud infrastructure free of misconfiguration vulnerabilities protects your organization from the bad actors seeking to expose or steal your data.”
- Josh Stella, Founder and CEO of Fugue
See Isaac's video on explaining data governance to the CEO, and read his complete blog post on explaining data governance to the CIO here.
