Power to The People – Creating Trust in Data with Collaborative Governance

Power
to The People – Creating Trust in Data with Collaborative Governance


Jason Bissell, General
Manager of Asia Pacific and Japan and
            Calvin Hoon, Regional VP for Sales, Asia Pacific

         

Today’s
enterprise IT organizations are once again experiencing a massive upheaval due
to pressure from employee forces.

It’s
a familiar story. Just think of the turmoil caused by the dawning of the bring-your-own-device
(BYOD) era, with employees demanding to use their beloved, personal mobile
phones or tablets for work. If IT balked at their requests for mobile, some
resourceful users would resort to workarounds – creating ‘shadow IT’ – to get access to corporate systems on their personal
devices.  Of course, in the process,
those employees also unknowingly put sensitive company information at risk.

Now even more IT agitations are on the
way, once again being generated by employee demand. This time, users demand access
to the
growing pools of big data companies have
amassed, and the insights they likely contain. If IT can’t deliver the tools to
access the information residing in corporate data lakes, employees will — just
as they did in the BYOD era—find a workaround, which will likely put enterprise
information at risk. Thus, there is no other option for IT than to deliver data
via self-service access across all lines of business. However, IT must find the
proper way to do so in order to prevent exposing company assets to unnecessary risk. They
must adopt a model of collaborative governance.

The
transition from authoritative to collaborative governance of company data might
be hard, but there’s an opportunity for corporate IT departments to create a
system of trust around enterprise data stores, wherein employees collaborate
with IT to maintain and/or increase the
quality, governance and security of data. The good news is that IT
professionals have a blueprint from the companies that pioneered the use of the
World Wide Web for collaborative data governance. Just as Web 2.0 evolved around trends
that focused on the idea of user collaboration, sharing of user-generated content, and social networking, so too
does the concept of collaborative governance. Collaborative governance breaks
down the technological and psychological barriers between enterprise data keepers
and information consumers, allowing everyone within an organization to share
the responsibility of securing enterprise data.  This concept has
the power to transform entire industries.

Wikipedia is a good example of user
collaboration in action. Launched in 2001, it is the world’s sixth most popular
website regarding
overall visitor traffic.  Everyone can
contribute or edit entries – a mixed blessing when it comes to reliability and
trust. 

Or
take TripAdvisor, an American travel website company that provides reviews of
travel-related content and interactive travel forums.  It was an early adopter of user-generated
content. 

Airbnb
is another excellent example of collaborative governance in action. Founded in
2008 as a “trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world,”
including, as the website states, “an
apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month,” it is the users themselves that provide the venues,
and the company that provides a platform which owners and travelers can
leverage to share and book venues. 

The
greatest challenge – and enabler – for this model has always been trust. Users place
their trust in others to accurately update content and information (ratings), meaning
consumers are putting their trust solely in the information presented to them. The
system works because the data in the system is bountiful and the platform it
resides within is designed specifically to enhance user experience.

Now
let’s consider the typical IT landscape in an enterprise. Information used to
be designed and published by a very small number of data professionals
targeting their efforts to “end-users”, or consumers, who were ingesting the
information. Today, the proliferation of information within companies is uncontrollable,
just like it was on the Web. We’re all experiencing the rise of a growing
number of cloud applications coming through sales, marketing, HR, operations or
finance to complement centrally designed, legacy IT apps, such as ERP, data
warehousing or CRM. Digital and mobile applications connect IT systems to the
external world. To manage these new data streams, we are watching new
data-focused roles emerging within corporations, such as data analysts, data
scientists or data stewards, which are blurring the lines between enterprise data
consumers and providers. Just like the adoption of BYOD, these new roles are
presenting challenges of corporate data quality, reliability, and trust that must be addressed by IT organizations. 

As
the Web 2.0 model evolved, trust between consumers and their service providers was
established by crowdsourced mechanisms for rating, ranking and establishing a digital reputation (think Yelp). One lesson learned in the consumer world is that the
rewards of trust are huge. These same positive returns can be realized by enterprise IT departments that
adopt selected strategies embraced by their more freewheeling consumer
counterparts.  

Delivering
a system of trust through collaborative data governance and self-service is
just one of the opportunities available to evolving IT organizations.  Through self-service, line of business users become
more involved with the actual collection, cleansing, and qualification of data
from a variety of sources, so that they can then analyze that data and use it for
more informed decision-making. Currently, many companies—in
their mad rush to become data-driven—are increasingly making decisions based on
incomplete and inaccurate data. In fact, according to The Data Warehousing
Institute, ‘dirty data’ is costing businesses $600B a year. Companies will continue
to experience extreme loss and possible failure if they don’t have a sound data
governance system in place.

Collaborative
data governance is an easy way for IT to help ensure that the quality, security, and accuracy of enterprise
information is preserved in a
self-service environment. Collaborative governance allows employees in an
organization to correct, qualify and cleanse enterprise information. This helps IT because the master data records
are being updated by those most familiar
with or closest to the data itself (i.e. the marketing analyst who cleanses
tradeshow leads, or the financial analyst who rectifies a budget spreadsheet).

Additionally,
fostering the crucial shift to more business user involvement with an
organization’s critical data leads to
numerous other benefits.  For example, users
save time and increase productivity when they work with trusted data. Marketing
departments improve their campaigns. Call centers work with more reliable,
accurate customer information, much to everyone’s satisfaction. And the
enterprise gets better control over its most valuable asset: data. 

So
my simple message to companies looking to become more data driven: digital transformation
can be achieved—it’s all just a matter of
trust.