Data Governance & Data Quality

Data Governance is becoming more and more crucial to organizations in order to consolidate and saveguard the investments made in the data by an organization as a whole. It will usually be done using an on-going program which will be there to define how to deal with data related topics in a common way within the organization and to provide support to the data stakeholders.

A Data Governance program can take many forms depending on the needs and the current situation within your organization, it can focus on topics like data definition and standards, data quality, privacy and security, data architecture and integration, data warehousing and management alignment. Depending on the level of maturity of your organization on those topics, the data governance program will help you to coordinate the efforts of the existing programs or help you to setup new programs in order to deal with those topics. element61 can help you in defining a tailor made Data Governance program for your organization using our extensive experiences in all those areas.

In all cases a Data Governance program will have components dealing with:
  • Data definition standards and policies
  • Data ownership, accountabilities and decision rights processes
  • Data Stewardship and Data Quality
  • Data Security and Privacy
  • Data Life-cycle management

Using recognized standards and methodologies like the open Data Governance Institute Framework or the more strict IBM Data Governance Council Maturity Model, element61 can help you in the definition of all those components to make sure that you follow the right track to accomplish your organization objectives.

Data Quality is also hot! And it should be. We have never come across any organization, no matter how small or well-run, who does not have any data quality problems. Dealing with data quality issues is however extremely difficult and there certainly is no one-size-fits-all methodology, technique or software to address this.

A mistake commonly made is to address data quality from a purely technical perspective. We do not argue that some data quality problems do have a technical answer, but most often the organizational and process aspects play a decisive role in solving the issues. element61 recognizes this and adopts a comprehensive approach in improving data quality. This involves the following services:

  • Data Quality processes and organization. As part of our data governance offering, we can audit your existing if any data quality processes and compare it with some best practices. This typically will involve creating and defining the role of a Data Quality steward in the organization.
  • Data Quality review. Depending on the software that is available in your environment, we can perform a quick data quality scan based on the technique of data profiling. This will quickly give an objective measurement of the quality of the data in your transactional environment or data warehouse.
  • Data Quality architecture. By using standard functionality of most ETL software, we can set-up a flexible and pragmatic data quality architecture that can safeguard the quality of the data warehouse. We also offer a reusable set-up for building a data profiling solution by combining any ETL and BI software to deliver basic data quality reporting.
  • Data Quality dedicated software. With our knowledge of this niche software market, element61 can help you select the right data quality software that fulfills the business requirements and integrates with your environment. We have specific knowledge about the solutions from IBM Websphere Information Analyzer, IBM Infosphere QualityStage, SAP Business Objects Data Quality management, Informatica and SAS Institute DataFlux.

Contact us for more information or with your specific request.