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Overview 97

Activity: Align Business Needs and Data Governance

This activity should be done only if there are no other forms of business alignment. So don’t confuse
yourselfdyou do this activity OR the prior one. It depends on your situation. If there are no obvious
business cases tied to any information management-type solutions, then you need to do this. The most
typical scenarios we see are:
• A CIO starts an MDM project strictly as a technology effort.
• An ERP software package is used to integrate data with no business drivers.
Remember, DG needs to support the business. It is a business program. If you cannot state its outcomes
in business terms, then the simple, ugly fact is you may not succeed.
This activity is presented here because all too often the CIO is told, or tells some subordinates, to
“Get some data governance running.” When the typical scenarios presented earlier happen, the projects
tend to leave a smoking crater. Then the realization sets in that data governance should have been
deployed as part of the MDM or ERP project. In these settings, there has been little business input, so
the outcomes of DG cannot be defined even if the DG team manages to get them up and running.
This activity serves to collect and analyze business objectives, goals, and drivers and, in effect,
replace the missing business case(s) that should be there. They, in turn, state how an organization is
trying to improve itself and are presented in terms relevant to the business area being described. Most
methodologies and analysis systems have a hierarchy of goals, objectives, etc. For this text, the
hierarchy is as follows:
• Drivers are industry- or market-inspired trends, usually stated in terms of a direction. These tend to
be categories of business goals.
• Goals are refinements of drivers, expressing the general trend in terms that indicate desired
accomplishments within a timeframe.
• Documented objectives are the specified measurable criteria for achieving the goals and drivers.
• Measureable Attributes are aspects of the business to be measured. These become metrics or
a category of metrics.
An example of a driver is customer intimacy. A goal would be improve customer retention, and the
ii
objective would be increase customer retention to 97 percent this year.
This activity is not as detailed as it could be if the team was doing a full-on enterprise information
strategy. There is just enough analysis to show how DG can hold up its end in the business
environment.
Since this section is essentially an abridged version of the full process for EIM business alignment,
we once again reduced some text from the book Making EIM Work for Business. For consistency, we
will follow the Farfel case shown in Figure 9-4.
Lastly, the acronym BIR is going to appear. BIR stands for business information requirement,
which is the label given to any data, information, or content required by an enterprise to get its work
done. Most of the time, BIRs are manifested in the form of metrics or business events; however, they
can also be documents, regulatory mandates, or industry-standardized reference data. Remember this,
because we use it a lot.

ii
Ibid.