Information Governance is a key discipline to manage the data quality and overall Information accessibility, security and usability. It is very logical to see the benefits it can bring to the organization. However the soft benefits, can only help start the conversation , but getting Executive commitment will take much more convincing data. Like every other project, Information Governance needs to have full justification as well. So, how can the investment be justified? What is the impact of the Information Governance on the Organization? Is there an independent survey or statistics one can refer?
Well, I was curious and I looked up this research from Aberdeen. It is interesting to see the impact with and without Governance on Quality (accuracy, completeness, time to information, and time to decision). In other words, companies carry out Data projects without Governance and leaves so much improvement on the table. Having the right structure to leverage data is critical to the success of company’s overall strategy.
So what areas should Information Governance should focus? According to the Dataversity survey, top 3 areas where Information Governance applied are:
- Analytics and Reporting
- Information Security
- Compliance
Cost of doing nothing is very clear from the above table. Low accuracy and time-to-decision has to make a huge impact on the analytics. It is even possible that the correct data may change the outcome. I find that all four Metrics were very critical to the analytics and to overall benefit of the organization. Time to information is another key area which implies not only for reporting and analytics but also real-time / near real-time data integration to consuming applications. For example knowing customer behavior pattern, what they looked and what is their wish list, matching with their demographics, offering products, up sell opportunities
