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Other Terms 15

why the definition of data quality appears now in this text. It is a key driver of governance, because
without governance, data quality efforts become costly one-off exercises.
Data governance supports data quality solutions via:
1. Ensuring that data quality standards and rules are defined and integrated into development and day-
to-day operations.
2. Ensuring that on-going evaluation of data quality occurs.
3. Ensuring that organization issues related to changed processes and priorities are addressed.

Business Intelligence
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Business intelligence (BI) has grown from a term coined by Gartner Group in the 1990s. It has since
morphed (evolved is too complimentary) into a label that describes a self-perceived cool way of
looking at data. Our DMBOK reference states BI is:
1. Query, analysis and reporting activity by knowledge workers to monitor and understand the
financial and operational health of the enterprise.
2. Query, analysis and reporting processes and procedures.
3. A synonym for the business intelligence environment.
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4. The market segment for business intelligence software tools.
From our DG perspective, we will stick with this definition: At its roots, BI means one core con-
ceptdusing information to achieve organization goals. The rest is techno-speak and not relevant to our
discussion on governance. Data governance enhances BI in a number of ways:

1. DG is used to ensure that BI activity is aligned with business activity. Many BI-related efforts never
reach potential because they merely regurgitate data back to a requestor versus trying to change the
business.
2. DG ensures that data quality is defined and supportive of BI. Data profiling activity is defined in the
context of supporting BI data quality, and data quality remediation is occurring.
3. DG is used to ensure consistency in data standards and algorithms. Far too often, multiple business
areas define a metric with the same name and different meaning and/or algorithm.
4. Lastly, we promote DG as important to enforcing the defined BI delivery architecture (i.e., make
sure that organizations avoid exponential growth of spreadsheets, Access databases, and
uncontrolled redundancy).

OTHER TERMS

A few other terms we will use frequently are related to actual elements of a DG program. We will
review these in detail in upcoming sections. However, it is good to be aware of these before
proceeding.

vii
Power, D. J., “A Brief History of Decision Support Systems.” Retrieved November 1, 2010.
viii
Mosely, Mark, Editor, “The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management.”