Data Governance 2013

The market for data governance is diffuse. Historically, there have been, and remain, several different sectors. In particular, the governance of data has typically been split between structured data–whose governance has typically been provided by data quality vendors–and spreadsheet and unstructured data governance, with both of these latter categories, especially the former, attracting its own corpus of suppliers. In addition, there are vendors, particularly in the structured data governance space, that have developed capabilities specifically to address the concerns of governance and stewardship. These are typically used to complement data quality suites that do not have the requisite capabilities when it comes to governance.

This disparity of offerings reflects the stances of both the IT industry and of the organisations that have or are implementing data governance. On the one hand companies tend to view governance on a piecemeal and siloed basis while, on the other, vendors do not have anything in the way of an integrated solution to offer. Thus, while governance should be viewed holistically, it is not.

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