“Three reasons why you need data governance”

David Linthicum recently posted a brief article at ebizQ on Data Governance: Three Reasons why you Need Data Governance – Leveraging Information and Intelligence

It’s an insightful piece that clearly articulates the need for data governance. In short:

1. Data management in global 2000 companies is a nightmare which poses a risk.
2. Security requires data goverance
3. The move towards SOA and Cloud computing increases the need for strong data governance processes.

I especially like (and agree with) David’s third point. For one, organizations that are serious about implementing SOA are quickly confronted with the need for what is often called an “enterprise information model” or “canonical model”. (I believe David uses the more academic term “ontology”, see his post on vertical and horizontal ontologies here) Implementing these come with quite the challenges however. See our article on “Challenges with a canonical data model approach” and our white paper “Business Semantics for effective Application Integration and SOA“.

Collibra’s Data Governance solution nicely address this needs by managing and governing your business definitions, facts and rules on a business level, using OMG’s natural-language based SBVR standard. Collibra’s SOA solution enables you to leverage this enterprise information model (which we call “Business Semantics”) operationally by generating semantic data transformation and validation services which you can easily deploy on your existing infrastructure (Collibra is Oracle partner, and has running integrations with Microsoft’s BizzTalk and SAP’s Netweaver stack).