In this post we review, from our experience and knowledge, various points in making the case for pragmatic data governance (or data intelligence) return on investment (ROI). Good data governance will reduce costs, saves time and allow for better decision making as well as create a positive financial or strategic outcome.
Data governance is about creating best-practices designed to help people access, understand, connect, and effectively use your organization’s data across all systems.
First, before you can make the case for data governance, you need to gather the estimated costs for it. Ask yourself the following questions and come up with an annual cost:
- Dedicated Resources?
- Stewardship time?
- Tool investment?
- Actual time spent governing?
Ask yourself if these data governance tasks would have happened before but were never captured or organized.
Making the case – let’s look at 11 benefits for data governance:
1) Respected Opinions – Here are just 3 examples of respected higher education associations mentioning the need for data governance:
A Data-Enabled Executive brief by American Council of Education (ACE) states in its conclusion:
"Colleges and universities have begun to embrace the analytics revolution, but more must be done in order for it to firmly take root. The benefits of modernizing analytics are manifold and include equitable access and outcomes, and more sustainable and inclusive campuses. To reap those benefits, a few things must first happen. Data governance and stewardship practices must be strong in order to ensure that data are of quality and secure, and that data use is ethical. Cross-functional data should be integrated so that individual faculty, staff, and administrators can assess the effectiveness of various courses, programs, and services. This requires a common language and standard definitions around data…”
The full brief can be found at: http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/The-Data-Enabled-Executive.aspx
The Higher Education Data Warehouse (HEDW) Forum group 2017 Survey of Top 10 Issues states:
“Data Governance Is #1 for the second straight year. 57% of respondents placed this in their Top 10.
The full survey can be found at: https://hedw.org/2017-hedw-survey-of-top-10-issues/
EDUCAUSE 2018 Top 10 IT Issues Report
Decision making was a big part of the 2018 Top 10 IT Issues report done by EDUCAUSE with 3 in the top 10. We related better decision making to better data governance. Here are the 3 decision making / data governance related items on the list:
- #4 Data-enabled institutional culture: Using BI and analytics to inform the broad conversation and answer big questions
- #8 (tie) Data management and governance: Implementing effective institutional data governance practices
- #8 (tie) Digital integrations: Ensuring systems interoperability, scalability, and extensibility, as well as data integrity, standards, and governance, across multiple applications and platforms
More on the EDUCAUSE report can be found at: https://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/research/top-10-it-issues-technologies-and-trends/2018
2) Value Multiplier on Existing Investments – Your reporting and business intelligence tools might be a costly to implement and maintain. Ask yourself these questions:
- How much does your institution spend every year on Reporting/BI? or
- Are they getting their return on that investment?
Good data governance would achieve better outcomes and adoption, for your reporting/BI tolls.
3) Time Wasted Calculator - Asynchronous communication and just-in-time data governance is a cost-effective substitute for the tradition data governance committee meetings. Can we calculate actual time/money saved by eliminating inefficient DG committee meetings?
4) New Hires - Faster on-boarding for new hires with access to the knowledge base.
5) Audit Compliance - Avoid costly audit and compliance issues.
6) Ranking or Regulatory Reporting - Avoiding bad data decisions that could impact regulatory or ranking reporting
7) Fixing Issues Before They Get Expensive – Identify and resolve data quality issues before they become more expensive to fix.
8) Avoid the News and the Lawyers - Help protect against security, privacy, or FERPA violations.
9) Help Detect and Stop Fraud - Fraud detection using data quality rules monitoring.
10) Faster Decision Making - Fast data request turnaround means more rapid decision making. Which can avoid costly problems or allow to act sooner on profitable opportunities.
11) Facilitate Self-service Reporting - A data governance knowledgebase will help facilitate self-service reporting as well as save time/money by avoiding dedicated report-writers.
Hope this list was beneficial in getting the most return on investment in your organization's data governance such as a higher education institution. Hope this blog post was beneficial to you and your organization. Additional resources on data governance adoption and return on investment can be found in this blog post. You can access all of our data governance resources here.
More information on the Data Cookbook (pricing, private demo setup, videos, information, etc.) can be found at www.datacookbook.com. Or if you need any data governance services, IData experts are available to assist. Feel free to comment back or contact us on any data governance stories in higher education (failures or successes). 
(image credit: StockSnap_NY3CT07Z7G_ROIDGTrees_BP #1050)
