Data governance — Protecting and unleashing the value of your customer data assets

Abstract

Many organizations are waking up to the fact that customer data is a valuable corporate asset that needs careful protection and their value actively managed or 'governed'. An increasing number are also discovering the hard way that data can also be a significant liability. Zurich Insurance was recently fined a UK record £2.27 m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for losing details on 46,000 customers. This paper highlights the need for taking the utmost care with management of your customer data. It also makes the case for investing in, and actively developing, its value for much broader business benefit of increased sales, reduced operational cost, greater profits and long-term growth. It defines and details an emerging management discipline called data governance, explaining exactly what is meant by the term, and what people are trying to achieve by introducing data governance discipline within their organization. It's an important subject that's going to get bigger and more central to organizations in the future. The paper explains the strong links between corporate governance, risk and compliance and how data underpin all three, and how it too needs to be 'governed'. Without strong data governance the organization will fail to provide effective corporate governance and compliance, and will open the organization to significant risk of failure in both. Not least, without effective data governance the organization will fail to maximize the value of its data assets. With the case made for data governance, the second part of the paper focuses on how organizations of any size can understand their own current data capability using the powerful Data Governance Maturity Model approach first developed for IT Governance. You will understand how to develop your own ideal 'to be' state and what actions you need to take to get there. The approach is illustrated through a case study for a leading 'not for profit' organization that is embarking on a major data governance programme. Its aim is to help maximize the benefits (and avoid failure) of its investment in a substantial Customer (Supporter) Relationship Management (SRM) programme to create a single view of all its supporters. This paper is the first of a series on this important topic of data governance. Through the series, we will follow this not for profit organization as it develops a new data organization, a realistic data strategy and roadmap and makes its way towards establishing optimal data governance throughout the organization and the highest level on the Data Governance Maturity Model. This is to both achieve success with its SRM programme and to really unleash the value of its supporter data.