How do you get more trust in your data? As Tina Turner would possibly say: "What's Gov got to do with it?"
It has everything to do with it. But technology alone does not deliver trusted data. Information managers need to define what data means to their organizations through data governance. Data governance is analogous—though not identical—to SOA governance, a discipline that has saved many SOA implementations from certain failure.
I really think Mike's blog on the subject says it best when he states...on http://blogs.oracle.com/governance : “Governance, regardless of what 'specialty' you are talking about, is a series of activities associated with influencing actions and behavior of an environment. SOA governance, data, governance, process governance, application governance, etc are all related to, but not dependent on, one another. It's not that one encompasses the other, but rather the activities associated with each should work in conjunction with the rest of the governance discipline.”
Data governance helps define not only data quality rules but also the processes for how the rules are maintained, approved, and iterated. As companies scale and grow, these established processes are critical to managing the lifecycle of enterprise data-centric architectures.
Data governance must include multiple data quality and data management capabilities, as well as allow for the human element in implementing a governed data-centric environment.
For example, a company might define certain data as off-limits to a set of roles that is integrated across multiple data hubs. This type of governance can be implemented by combining identity management and data access services or through an entitlement policy that is executed at runtime. In other cases, data quality might require a complex set of business logic to be specified as a business rule, or business processes might automate a workflow of data exception management. In each example, governance processes are key to successful enterprise implementations...
...and key to adding more visibility and control (perhaps not love) but almost as priceless.
