Information governance is the process of domesticating your wild information. Right now, you have feral information hiding in spreadsheets on laptops. You have information that is not following the basic house rules. (You might not even have documented house rules.) The result of all this information in the wild is chaos and value leakage. Imagine your house with five wild dogs in it. Now imagine your house with five perfectly trained dogs in it — the situation would be much better. The difference is clear, but often the process of moving from point A to point B is unclear. Information governance is that process.

If you were dealing with a house, you might need dog whisperers to domesticate those wild dogs into well-trained ones. In the case of information, you need information whisperers. These information whisperers normally have titles such as business analyst, data analyst, data steward, master data specialist, or global data manager. They must understand how information behaves, which policies need to actively govern the information’s behavior, and how to understand if the information is, in fact, behaving.

In this article, we’ll discuss how information governance helps you move from point A to point B, relying on best practices gleaned from our ASUG Data Governance Special Interest Group, experience with companies using SAP systems, and industry experts. Best of all, the techniques and tools mentioned in the article apply to any information-heavy project, including SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) implementations, business process engineering, predictive analytics, master data management implementations, data migrations, and more.

Business Processes Need Reliable Information

Do not underestimate how business processes absolutely rely on clean, consistent information. For example, in the case of airplane defects, if a model number was not stored according to a defined data standard, quick identification of a high-risk aircraft would not happen. The risk of not applying information governance principles is well known and unacceptably high — in this example, resulting in aircraft accidents and human tragedy.

Now think about your business. Which information elements are absolutely critical to your business? Which business processes depend on those information elements being of high quality? What does high quality mean to each individual business process? Which elements must be dealt with first? Who owns understanding the ramifications of poor governance and driving the information governance program forward? Do you have an accurate assessment of where you are now? Could you quickly use predictive analytic techniques to proactively avoid large problems?

Of course, SAP tools and services, including SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM), SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence, and SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management, can help you with these tasks. SAP’s Business Transformation Services group also offers an Information Governance Maturity Assessment that helps you understand where you are now, and also establishes a roadmap for value-driven improvement in the future.

One Size Does Not Fit All 

Because information governance is most successful when practiced on an individual project, there cannot be a single best practice that fits all organizations. Instead, you need to evaluate your company along these dimensions and develop a plan that works best for your needs in these areas:

• Culture
• Information management maturity
• Management sponsorship
• Data domains and processes

Now, let’s look at each of these areas in more detail. We’ll start by asking important questions, then discuss the impact to your company, and reference real company examples.

Culture

How much change can your organization tolerate? Do you have lines of business or divisions that are used to working independently?

The further your company falls to the left (toward independence) on the spectrum shown in Figure 1, the more you’ll need to focus on applying specific data standards to critical data elements. Corporate alignment on ambiguous data standards, such as defining an active customer across sales, marketing, and finance, takes much more time. (Do not immediately start a project to optimize information for order to cash, for instance. The kinds of sweeping change that information for business process optimization would require will be more than your organization can tolerate.)

Figure 1

Culture measurement

The further your company moves to the right (toward alignment), the more you can focus on fit-for-use standards — and cleansing — for effective business processes.

Information Management Maturity

Do you have any Centers of Excellence or Competency Centers in place that focus on information (e.g., business intelligence, data quality, and master data)? Do you operate in a shared-services model? Do you have enterprise information architects that guide individual project decisions? Do you have a strategic information plan?

The further your company falls to the left (toward individual projects) on the spectrum in Figure 2, the more you’ll need to focus on localized value first. (Do not immediately start a project to manage vendor information globally, for instance.)

Figure 2

Information management maturity measurement

The further your company moves to the right (toward information strategy), the more you can use executive sponsorship and more centralized decision-making in your initial information governance efforts.

Management Sponsorship

Who owns the information: business or IT? Do you have a senior executive (one with organizational clout) who understands the power of information? Would an executive sponsor be able to align all the individual stakeholders to common goals and success metrics?

The further your company falls to the left (toward IT, ad hoc) on the spectrum in Figure 3, the more you’ll need to focus on easy-to-interpret information projects, such as automated cleansing of address information according to governmental standards. Although the business certainly needs to understand the kind of cleansing happening with their data, the extent of business/IT collaboration is limited because external bodies have already determined much of the fit-for-use decisions.

Figure 3

Management sponsorship measurement

The further your company moves to the right (toward business), the more you can use focus on projects where fit-for-use is very open to interpretation (for example, classifying and attaining a single view of vendor information).

Data Domains and Processes

Which business process or data domains are causing the most trouble in your organization? Which information is strategic? Which information is critical? Which information is shared across multiple business processes?

The further your company falls to the left (toward mystery information) on the spectrum in Figure 4, the more you’ll need to focus on finding, identifying, and tagging the information that has a high business value for your chosen project. Without this first step, your fledgling information governance team will have no way to prove value or impact. In addition, your group will not be able to accurately target their work for high value or estimate the amount of work necessary to complete the project.

Figure 4

Data domains and processes measurement

The further your company moves to the right (toward information inventory), the more you can use established baselines to set realistic, high-visibility metrics for your information stakeholders.

With answers to these questions in hand, your business leaders and IT leaders can collaborate on a working definition of information governance that is tailored to your specific company. SAP can also help you with this process via the Strategic Information Management group's Information Governance Maturity Assessment. 

Resources to Have in Place

After you tailor your governance approach to your company’s quirks, you are ready to start talking resources. Although it may be tempting to start evaluating technology resources, the best first step is to figure out people resources. There are people in your company now who touch information, modify the information frequently, and decide when the information should be archived. One great way to discover these hidden assets is with surveys. Send a quick Web survey out that asks employees if they touch, enrich, or manage information. Then have them clarify which information they touch, and what general actions they perform on that information (e.g., create, read, update, and delete). The survey results will show you the breadth of your information governance problem.

After you have the employees and your executive sponsor in place, you need to start working on documenting ownership and policies and standardizing important processes (for example, can Vendor Create use the same input form as Customer Create?).

These activities can be as light or as heavy as you defined in the Tailoring step. However, only after you have employees in place (including part-time employees) and have gained some experience actively managing the information can you begin to develop decent requirements for technology that will help you scale your efforts.

Process to Follow

Whew. You’ve defined a process and established both a rough organization and some basic tool requirements. To move up your governance maturity, follow these general steps:

• Define a data strategy that supports the business strategy and goals
• Identify the critical data elements that support those business goals
• Quantify how managing those data elements increases value
• Establish a current baseline for those critical elements
• Create an improvement plan
• Align business and IT behind enterprise data standards, policies, and processes
• Create data standards and processes supporting end-to-end business processes instead of ad hoc projects
• Achieve greater control and visibility over the data
• Understand and manage full data life cycle (creation to destruction)
• Quantify results
• Do it again
• Manage the change cycle

Keep in mind that any new critical projects can derail this project. Be prepared for these changes by using basic project management and tracking tools for your initial information governance project. Use these tools to document owners, policies that the groups decided on, criticality, metadata inventory, and more. If you document and track wisely, you’ll be able to pick up the project right where you left off. Also, you’ll be able to easily extend some of the decisions you made to the next information governance project.

For most companies, the key is to start with a small, tactical project. Track a few simple metrics along the way. Then widely publicize the great results you attained (in terms of business value). Before long, your group will be in high demand!