First, the good news: In its recent global survey, Teradata found out that 89% of organisations believe they should prioritise data governance, defined by Keith Budge, Teradata Executive Vice-President as “managing data to always be in the condition needed to support valuable action.”

Data governance, according to Budge, is increasingly important given how most organisations are now undergoing digitalisation and transitioning to the cloud. A data governance framework, in turn, enables organisations to create policies and procedures that will establish and implement good quality data and data management practices that “can cover the breadth of the data landscape from on-premises to multiple cloud providers, including a variety of SaaS solutions.”

Now, for the bad news: Half of these same respondents appear to be all talk.

According to the same global survey, 50 % of organisations do not have plans to increase data governance investments at the moment—even if they are cognisant of the need to prioritise it. In short, there is a clear disconnect between prioritising data governance and what organisations are willing to do to meet this priority.  

A Short-Sighted View on Data Governance

This unwillingness to invest in something that is, admittedly, so important is incredibly short-sighted, and it is failing data governance globally—specifically in the Asia Pacific region.

“While organisations understand that data governance is important, many in the region feel that they have invested enough. And that's why data governance implementations are failing because it's still seen largely as an expense,” says Budge in an exclusive interview with Data & Storage Asean. “There's no doubt that it is a significant expense but rightly so, given that so much of digital transformation success is hinged on the proper deployment and consistent execution of a data governance program. Essentially, data governance is not a one-off investment—something you build and walk away—but requires actual ongoing practice and oversight.”

Budge adds: “Executives often see only the upfront costs. For the short-sighted, the costs alone are reason enough to curtail further investment. But what organisations fail to see is the even higher costs when they need to retrofit data governance after systems are already operational, not to mention other costs like damage to their brand reputation, loss of trust by customers, maybe even severe fines levied by the authorities when things go wrong.”

A Failure to Strategise

This short-sightedness, though, is not the only reason data governance is largely failing. Another pain point is what Budge describes as “the lack of understanding of the importance of a sound data governance strategy and the value that it can drive.” In other words, key decision-makers know that data governance is important but are largely clueless in terms of how much it can drive a business forward and what strategy to use in implementing it.

The Teradata executive also laments how most organisations still see data governance as “a nice-to-have rather than a must-have,” and as “an expense that is significant but unnecessary or something that can wait.” Given this prevailing mindset, it should not come as a shock that many organisations are either putting off data governance initiatives for another day or investing just enough to cover the minimum requirement but “ignoring the potential cost of retrofitting data governance systems.”

All told, a paradigm shift appears to be the answer to the aforesaid pain points.

In particular, Budge would love for executives to reframe how they view data governance.

“Strong data governance should be viewed as a best practice, an accelerator, as a risk management tool for impact assessments, and as part of disaster management planning,” explains Budge. “Many organisations invest just enough in data stewardship and governance to satisfy government regulators and miss out on the value it can generate. With low priority and low expectations, many data governance projects are never positioned to succeed and that reinforces the perception of low value generated from the investment.”

And given the shift to multi-cloud environments, Budge is enjoining business leaders to rethink system architectures and data governance to address key issues, including granular data encryption and role-based access to security policies.

Turning to Teradata for Data Governance Help

Getting help from Teradata would help as well—immensely, according to Budge.  

“At Teradata, we help our customers across sectors make sense of their data and orchestrate the data management process from raw data through analytics and model scoring to effectively capture, integrate and process data on a massive scale,” he points out. “And we do this with enterprise-grade reliability while supporting a variety of mission-critical applications that have tight SLA requirements.”

The Teradata Vantage platform, in particular, helps customers connect their data regardless of where they are—on-premises, or across the multi-cloud or hybrid cloud—and unifies everything, from data lakes to data warehouses to analytics and new data sources and types, to unlock the answers the customer needs. Put simply, Vantage is a robust and flexible data management and advanced analytics platform that, in the words of Budge, “reframes data governance conversation in terms of benefits vs risk.” Among the things Vantage can do for an organisation, as Budge outlines are as follows:

• Identify top-priority, funded business initiatives and the data needed.

• Appoint stakeholders to take direct responsibility, in partnership with IT and a federated network of data domain owners and stewards. This establishes a foundation for implementing highly reusable and cross-functional data to support initiatives.

• Ensure data resources are flexible and scalable in every dimension from data volume to query concurrency on-premises and on public cloud infrastructures.

• Design best-in-class analytic platforms with integrated data governance solutions enabled by careful attention to established architectural principles.

• Work with end-users and application developers to understand common data management struggles and address them within data delivery projects.

• Establish “sandbox” environments with easy-to-use tools that support experimental data provisioning combined with easy access to authorised production data.

It Is Time to Act Now

This digital age is also the era of data, and this underpins why data governance is so critical now and moving forward. Evidently, though, many executives have yet to fully grasp the indispensable role of data governance in the modern business landscape and are, thus, unwilling to invest in it.

Again, it is incredibly short-sighted, and it needs to stop if organisations want to do things right and leverage data to the fullest in the process.