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Governance

Definition

Governance is the process of creating, managing, and delivering programs which always
focus on the corporate goal of delivering business value from data. This goal is a dream
come true when you can successfully orchestrate the program from gathering all the data
to harnessing wonderful and valuable business insights that increase the revenue for the
enterprise and deliver value to the customer.
Data is the biggest assets of an enterprise. With the right set of information, making
decisions regarding the business always provides the right levels of confidence as you
can audit and attribute the data you used for the decision-making process. The com-
plexities of managing applications which need to consume both structured and big data
ecosystems are not a trivial task. Enterprises that have been through this journey will tell
you. It is an ease of having governance as a part of the organization.
Data management refers to the process of collecting, processing, storing, and dis-
tribution of data. The data management techniques that we have been using today in the
modern database world, is based on requirements that were developed for legacy sys-
tems dating back from punch cards to mainframes to the analytical data processing
systems.
Fig. 9.1 shows the fundamental stages of data management across enterprises. There
are several cycles of activities within each stage of processing that creates complexities of
managing the entire process end to end. Before we look into the details of these pro-
cesses, let us take a brief look at metadata and master data.

Metadata and master data

Metadata is defined as data about data or in other words information about data within
any data environment. The origins of metadata can be traced to library systems from
many years ago, where the classification, tagging, and catalog of books provided the
fundamental information classification and retrieval. Applied to information technology,
metadata provides a natural way to integrate data and interrogate data.
Why is metadata so valuable? The answer to this question can be explained by a
simple exampledlet us assume you make a trip to the local hardware store to buy some
sheets of wood. Without any label describing the wood, its dimensional attributes and
price, you will be lost for hours waiting for someone to help you. This little label of
information is what the value of metadata is all about.

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