The criticality of Data Governance

There is little doubt that digital first companies need to harness the competitive advantages of leveraging data in today’s complex business world. Interconnected, hybrid and heterogenous cyber-physical organisations, datasets and personnel, along with focus on resilience and increasingly stringent compliance standards has necessitated the fruition of data governance.

Leadership teams are inculcating the ethos of governance across the data value-chain and its lifecycle to enhance its transparency, quality, uniformity, collection and processing. Thus driving intelligent data driven planning, forecasting, decisioning, and compliance activities. These benefits are further enhanced by the ability to recover from adverse events, inculcate a culture of data literacy and ethics, and thus realise maximum benefits from digital transformation and optimisation initiatives.

With vast proliferation and growth in sources, endpoints, datasets and stakeholders across the cyber-physical data value-chain, solid data governance is also a must-have for companies investing in responsible AI, automation, IoT and Industry 4.0, digital twins, cyber resilience, and other technologies.

Although a strong data governance ethos and culture is driven by top management focus, business-IT-compliance alignment, cross functional cooperation, stringent processes and metrics, it is critical to have a robust holistic technology platform at its core. Data governance platforms also provide the foundation for organisations to treat data as a product, unlocking value beyond KPIs, as well as improving ethics, human interactions, and problem-solving capabilities.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data is an end-to-end data governance foundational tool that aptly addresses all these aspects. The tool enables data stewards, custodians, users and owners to work with harmonised and accurate datasets throughout the data lifecycle, thus improving data driven business, innovation, resilience and compliance outcomes. Furthermore, IBM Cloud Pak for Data also enhances utilisation, productivity and satisfaction of all key data stakeholders.

How does IBM Cloud Pak for Data enhance data management and governance?

Gartner has ranked IBM in its Magic Quadrant for Data Quality solutions in 2022. IBM’s strong data governance capabilities was a key factor in Forrester’s naming of IBM as a leader in its Data Fabric Wave for 2022

IBM Cloud Pak for Data enables companies to harness scalable and flexible data architectures covering the volume, variety and variability of the increasingly diverse and hybrid data sources.

The IBM Match 360 tool facilitates consolidated AI powered master data management with constituent relationships across these data sources and datasets. Classification and organisation of these data sets provides a 360-degree data entity view and data assets taxonomy, thus ensuring accuracy, connectivity and consistency across applications and systems in the extended enterprise.

The tool further helps in privacy and governance compliance by classification of sensitive data and associating each data entity with the corresponding compliance standard.

The tool also addresses the critical aspect of data quality: accuracy, consistency, completeness, reliability and timeliness. Through profiling, parsing and matching, data stewards can easily address data scrubbing, error fixing, and deduplication. Thus, encompassing standards, AI powered rules, statistics and quality metrics, as well as reporting mechanisms across the vast data assets.

The IBM Knowledge Catalog Tool enables data catalogues, which are powered by active metadata management from various structured, unstructured and big data sources, thus creating an indexed organisational repository of data assets along with a unified business glossary. This inventory/ data catalogue further encompasses discovery, automated data lineage, data quality rules, retention, automation and orchestration policies, dashboards, machine learning models as well as search and collaboration tools.

The Knowledge Catalog also aids data consumers, by providing contextual insights through crystallising glossaries, classifications, terms, dictionaries and business profiling. Its self-service capabilities help data users perform discovery, manage policies and workflows, and conduct intelligent queries and analytics.

The catalog facilitates leveraging data ops as well as applying dynamic masking of sensitive data and other data protection, role based access and privacy features. Compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA have necessitated incorporation of privacy protections into data governance policies.

The IBM Data Virtualization Tool with Watson Query, available through the data fabric capabilities, is a universal data query engine, which executes virtualized and distributed queries across databases, layers, lakes, warehouses, and data in motion. These distributed and virtualized queries at source eliminate the need for data replication and movement, thus truly breaking down data silos.

The Add-on IBM Privacy Risk Assessment Module enables automated privacy risk assessments and provides corresponding recommendations and remediations across the hybrid data assets. Enabled by advanced fingerprint technology, dashboards and workflows, companies can derive risk scores on a granular dataset level and comprehend suggested steps for mitigation of these.

What are some other key features and additional advantages?

The modular IBM Cloud Pak can be deployed on premises, on cloud, or as a service. These modules along with IBM QualityStage facilitate a phase-wise and scalable roadmap towards enterprise scale data governance.

IBM’s data governance ecosystem has been further strengthened by the recently acquired Databand’s workload and pipeline level observability features, as well as by Manta’s automated data lineage capabilities.

IBM’s end-to-end and ever-expanding ecosystem and network also helps its customers immensely during m&a consolidation and restructuring initiatives. These data governance and management capabilities ensure smooth data migration, integrity and minimise business and system downtime.

IBM’s observability, data fabric and AI ecosystem further provides useful resources, tips, knowledge, best practices, fixes and support and helps improve the data governance posture of its customers.

How have organisations practically implemented IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

Built with data fabric architecture and harnessing watson AI capabilities, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is deployed across many leading BFSI and other organisations.

ING, a Dutch worldwide multinational banking and financial services leader has been embracing a cloud and cloud native strategy. Expanding from their traditional data lake into a hybrid cloud infrastructure, ING faced operational, technical and cost related challenges in data management and governance in this heterogenous, hybrid and disparate technology environment.

The intelligent data fabric solution powered by IBM Cloud Pak for data, enabled the ING data stakeholders to address these data quality and governance issues. The solution enabled definition of data quality rules, policies, contextual insights, access and usage rights, and privacy and protection considerations across its diverse datasets and hybrid environment.

Thus, providing accurate, consistent, high-quality, compliant and business contextual auditable data across relevant consumers and in a highly regulated environment. Moreover, based on data usage patterns, the data fabric solution also automates virtual or physical data integration. For more insights, here’s a detailed look at the ING IBM Cloud Pak for Data case study.

IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog for Cloud Pak has also enabled Danske Bank– Denmark’s largest financial institution to modernize and transform its data quality, management, privacy and governance practice, in the wake of changing compliance regulations and remote working.

Similarly, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, and IBM Knowledge Catalog solutions are amongst the IBM solutions that have helped Standard Bank in South Africa develop a strong data governance practice across their vast operations in the continent.

In Summary

Besides enhancing performance KPIs, unlocking additional opportunities, and achieving compliance and resilience, data governance is also an important driver of organisational data literacy. Data literacy is critical to empower human capital to imbibe knowledge, responsibility, guidelines, skills and tools to harness data for business outcomes, while maintaining a strong security and privacy posture.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data, along with other IBM Data Fabric tools, is a fundamental building block of data governance. The solution, augmented by policies, people, processes, training and communication, is a huge advantage for the intelligent, autonomic, agile, resilient, compliant and competitive data driven enterprise.

To know more about data governance, register for IBM Tech Connect on 6th December.