Page 28 -

xxx Enterprise Data Governance

software which is often locked in, hard-coded and stratified,
in order to situate it in a new kind of information system
assets repository, under the responsibility of business users
themselves. The first of these repositories is that of reference
and master data, i.e. through Master Data Management
(MDM).

The loss of control of data

Under pressure, to be ever more agile and conform to
1
business regulations , a company can no longer tolerate a
rigid IT: it must find the means to transform it in order to
make it more flexible and transparent for business users.
This transformation starts by retaking control of the heart of
systems, that is to say the data, in a unified manner across
the whole of the information system. The renovation of IT
cannot be achieved while the meaning and value of data are
unreliable and not shared by the actors in the company. This
re-appropriation effort is even more urgent as IT is not only
unsuitable for business users, it also lacks transparency for
IT specialists themselves, even though they are in charge of
maintaining it. They no longer know the data they are
supposed to govern well enough. It is too often situated in
legacy databases which are poorly documented.

Like me, the reader will have been confronted, too often,
with the inability of a company to provide up to date
documentation of the meaning of data, beyond a technical
description. This lack of quality is costly and poses strategic
problems that have been studied by a number of consulting
firms such as, for example, here: “Companies are making bad
operational decisions every day of the week [and losing
money] because of bad data quality”, says Ted Friedman, an
analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut. “Poor data
management is costing global businesses more than $1.4

1. Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Basel II, Solvency II, Green regulations, etc.