Data Governance is often viewed as a cost of doing business rather than a driver of business value and innovation. But it is in fact critical to the agility of an organization’s analytics initiatives and its ability to make informed business decisions. The explosion of available data, the reduced cost of analyzing it, and pressure from the business to leverage it make delivering access to quality data more important than ever. What good is all that data if it takes you weeks to find what you need, get access to it, and validate that it is appropriate to base critical decisions on? So how do you put a dollar value on an investment in data governance software?

A starting point for the business case has to do with the amount of time employees searching for, understanding, and cleansing data via highly manual processes and what kind of an improvement a fit for purpose tool set can deliver. How much time do your business analysts or IT staff spend doing the following:

• Understanding what data sets they need to gain certain analytic insights
• Determining the quality and origin of each data set
• Understanding/agreeing on what a certain term or formula in a report means
• Cleansing data

The other side of the coin is what is the lost revenue to the business of poor data quality, a lack of insight from the business on what data they are basing analytic insights on or what data sets they have available to them. Some potential ways to approach this are looking at:

• Delayed rollout or failure of analytics initiatives
• Cost of false claims not identified (fraud)
• Fines associated with bad data, ungoverned processes or data exposure