A few years ago, Big Data/Hadoop systems were generally a side project for either storing bulk data or for analytics. But now as companies have pursued a data unification strategy, leveraging the Next Generation Data Architecture, Big Data and Hadoop systems are becoming a strategic necessity in the modern enterprise.
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Big Data and Hadoop are technologies with so much promise and a very broad and deep value proposition. But why are enterprises struggling to see real-world results from their Big Data investments? Simply put it is governance. In the rush to get Big Data systems enterprises are choosing to govern big data systems with processes that were intended for legacy data warehouse systems (or even worse transactional systems). Actually, if most organizations are honest with themselves, they would realize their less than agile data delivery and limited business intelligence value created from these legacy systems was a result of the governance processes, not the technology.
Now that Big Data and Hadoop have become mainstream, things are getting worse. Governance processes, frameworks, and approaches that were developed 20 years ago were not meant manage the volume, variety, and velocity of data required to be successful in the new digital economy. Imagine trying to identify data stewards for 10,000 tables and a few million data elements.
Does your organization have governance for your Big Data capabilities? Can you answer “yes” to the following questions?
- Do you have a data delivery process that has been tailored to your organization’s Big Data capabilities?
- Have you implemented a pattern-based delivery process?
- Have you changed your Data Governance process to govern data based the data’s value and usage?
- Have you established governance of citizen integrators and business content authors?
- Have you adopted capability management approaches for maturing the supported use-cases and functions of your Big Data environment?
If you have answered “no” to most of these questions, your organization should probably access the adequacy of its big data governance.
Follow Bill on Twitter @bigdata73 for other insights and industry news.
