Pair BI and Analytics With Data GovernanceBusiness intelligence and analytics tools offer organizations many exciting opportunities, but certain features—such as self-service—can introduce just as many problems as prospects. Teaming data governance with these tools can preserve their usefulness.

EDITOR’S NOTE BI DATA GOVERNANCE FACES SELF-SERVICE, BIG DATA HURDLES

SELF-SERVICE ANALYTICS NEEDS ASSISTANCE FROM GOVERNANCE

CDOs TAKE CHARGE ON DATA ACCESSIBILITY

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Govern for the Common BI Good

In its 2015 Magic Quadrant report on busi-ness intelligence and analytics platforms, consulting and research company Gartner highlighted the continuing shift in the BI mar-ket toward self-service software for business users—and the difficulty of governing the use of those tools. Gartner analysts predicted that through 2016, less than 10% of self-service BI applications will be governed effectively enough to prevent data inconsistencies that could negatively affect analytics results and the business decisions based on them.

Data governance—ensuring, among other things, that common data definitions and poli-cies on managing and using data are in place across an organization—is a big part of the overall process of governing BI initiatives. In a 2014 article published on our sister site Search-BusinessAnalytics, consultant Wayne Ecker-son described the inconsistent definitions and duplicate information that can result when data

isn’t well governed as the “evil twins” of BI and analytics programs. And at the 2015 BI Leader-ship Summit in New York, Eckerson said that “even sophisticated organizations” often find themselves at the mercy of those evil twins.

This handbook looks at the challenges of bal-ancing user autonomy and data governance in BI deployments and offers advice on how to get it right. First, we report in more depth on what Eckerson and other speakers and attendees at the BI Leadership Summit had to say about governing BI data. Next, we detail what some BI software vendors are doing to aid the data governance cause in self-service settings and share feedback from users. We close with input from several chief data officers on their role in governance efforts, particularly in managing access to BI and analytics data. n

Craig StedmanExecutive Editor, SearchDataManagement

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GETTING STARTED

BI Data Governance Faces Self-Service, Big Data Hurdles

During a presentation at the 2015 BI Leadership Summit in New York, consultant Joe Caserta asked how many attendees had active data governance programs in their orga-nizations. About half of the 90 or so people in the audience raised their hands. Then he asked how many were fully governing all of their data. Not a single hand went up. “Zero percent—I think that’s statistically significant,” Caserta quipped.

Effectively governing the data used in busi-ness intelligence (BI) and analytics applications was a big discussion topic at the conference, which was co-hosted by TechTarget’s Search-BusinessAnalytics website and consultancy Eckerson Group. According to Caserta and other speakers and attendees, data governance efforts are being challenged by two ongoing trends: the shift toward self-service BI tools that often are deployed by individual business units and the growing emphasis on big data

analytics initiatives that tap new types of data and technologies, such as Hadoop and Apache Spark.

In his opening keynote, Wayne Eckerson, principal consultant at Eckerson Group, said that power, influence and budget money are flowing away from the BI teams in many com-panies, with business units and departments increasingly getting autonomy on analytics purchases and investments. “BI leaders are on the wrong side of the pendulum swing now,” he noted.

But Eckerson added that BI managers and developers still have a crucial role to play—and that leading the data governance process should be part of that role. “In most organi-zations I go into, [data governance] is a huge pain point,” he said. “And until companies can achieve a common data vocabulary, they’re not going to get very far on effective analytics.”

Organizations that have gone the self-service

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GETTING STARTED

route likely can’t go back to a fully centralized BI structure. But Eckerson said that in addition to shepherding the development of universal data definitions and usage guidelines, BI man-agers can work to foster more unified analytics

processes by creating an internal data catalog to help analysts and business users find the infor-mation they need and communicating a big-picture view of different technology options and their pros and cons.

Ideally, Eckerson said, BI teams will “be somewhere in the middle” of all the sepa-rate analytics activities in organizations, “and everyone will be happy.” Otherwise, he warned, the end result could be “data silos and spread-marts, and this chaotic environment where nothing adds up.”

PROPER BALANCE REQUIRED

Striking the right balance on BI data governance can be tricky, though. Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson, who also spoke at the conference, recommended that the bulk of governance oper-ations be concentrated at the data warehousing stage to ensure that information is clean and consistent before it’s made available for analy-sis. In BI applications, he explained, governance work should primarily involve monitoring data usage and adjusting policies if needed—not putting up any big roadblocks for end users.

“If you prevent me from using a certain report, I have so many workarounds,” Evelson said, pointing in particular to Excel spread-sheets—still a common alternative to higher-level BI tools in many organizations.

Conference attendee Oana Garcia, a vice president and head U.S. data steward at Allianz Global Investors, said the investment manage-ment company is just getting started on a data governance program designed to make the use of data for analytics purposes more consistent. “We have different teams interpreting data in different ways,” she said. “We need to make the data definitions more transparent.”

“ [Data governance] is a huge pain point. … Until companies can achieve a common data vocabu-lary, they’re not going to get very far on effective analytics.”

—WAYNE ECKERSON, consultant

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GETTING STARTED

Garcia, who is based in the company’s New York office, added that the governance team is focused on making the process useful to busi-ness users at Allianz. For example, instead of just writing policies on using data, it’s looking to do things such as changing the column lay-outs in reports based on feedback from users. “We want to stay away from the theoretical and make it practical,” Garcia said.

ACHIEVING DATA HARMONY

At TrueEx Group LLC, a New York-based company that operates a financial exchange for interest rate swap transactions, deploy-ing BI software was itself a big step forward on data governance. In the past, tracking the data generated by TrueEx’s trading platform was “a very manual process,” which ultimately led to different departments using “slightly different numbers” for reporting and analysis, said David Hayman, the company’s director of operations.

The BI tools, from software vendor Sisense Inc., have helped to standardize things, accord-ing to Hayman. “The data is there, and it’s solid,” he said. “It was just a question of making

it visible to users in a consistent view across the entire company.”

Big data, including unstructured and semi-structured forms of information, adds new data governance issues to consider. In Hadoop data lakes and other big data environments, “the way we think about data has to change,” said Caserta, who is president of consultancy Caserta Concepts.

For example, he said that to maximize the business value of big data analytics applica-tions, data scientists and other analysts need to be allowed to explore raw data sets in an unfettered way. Also, centralized master data management—a key component of many gov-ernance initiatives—is more difficult with data captured from social networks and other “acci-dental systems,” Caserta noted.

But Caserta still puts a traditional data ware-house with fully governed and trustworthy data at the top of the BI and analytics pyramid. Information stored in a data warehouse “has to be governed, has to be secure and has to have metadata associated with it,” he said. “Then it can go out to the mass of business users via BI tools.” —Craig Stedman

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FACES SELF-SERVICE,

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TOOLS

Self-Service Analytics Needs Assistance From Governance

As more and more businesses implement self-service analytics software, a glaring need for data governance plans is becoming apparent.

While self-service tools can provide business users with a simple way to access and analyze data, they also can give them the ability to feed bad data back into enterprise data stores, silo off important insights or publish informa-tion that should be kept private. The need for improved data governance in self-service set-tings has touched off a race among software vendors to see who can get to the governance finish line first.

In the spring of 2015, both MicroStrategy Inc. and Birst Inc. introduced self-service business intelligence products that stress data gover-nance. MicroStrategy 10 is built around the company’s pre-existing enterprise data infra-structure that brings multiple data sources into a common data warehouse accessible by the

entire organization. Meanwhile, Birst 5X comes with a data integration layer that can recon-cile disparate data types and pull them into an enterprise-wide data warehouse. Visualization tools on top of this let people query data no matter where it is stored.

At the same time, traditional self-service players are touting their governance capabili-ties. Tableau Software has built-in capabilities that allow administrators to assign users to roles that control what they are able to do with data. The QlikView product from Qlik Tech-nologies comes with a governance dashboard that allows administrators to see which busi-ness users and analysts are using specific data sources and what they’re doing with the data.

Vendors increasingly see their governance capabilities as a differentiator in a crowded market. “That is where the market is going,” according to Paul Zolfaghari, president of MicroStrategy.

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TOOLS

It’s not hard to see why vendors are doubling down on their governance functionality. These kinds of features are quickly becoming a mini-mum requirement, rather than simply nice to have, as users have already seen how poor gov-ernance can lead to siloed and untrustworthy data as well as unauthorized access of pro-tected data.

“The poison of the more open-ended tools would be the inability to be secure,” said Jay Egan, senior product manager at The Advisory Board.

Egan and his team use MicroStrategy 10 to create data dashboards that track various quality metrics for healthcare clients. Work- ing in a highly regulated industry with strong privacy laws means being able to control access to data and ensure its quality are para- mount.

Mike Bozek, vice president of business line management at Elekta AB, said he decided to go with the Birst 5X platform primarily because

of its data integration capabilities. Elekta is also in the healthcare space, providing electronic health records and performance management systems to hospitals and cancer centers. He explained that healthcare as an industry is gen-erally behind the times when it comes to tech-nology adoption but is digitizing health records and data from patient monitoring systems at a rapid pace. As it does so, it’s important to avoid putting in systems that segregate data within departments.

“Most of our clients today use their own Excel spreadsheets or Crystal Reports, but moving to a real-time dashboard is huge,” he said.

Of course, just because vendors are touting their governance plan now doesn’t mean they all offer equally strong functionality. Boris Evelson, an analyst at Forrester Research, said self-service analytics buyers should look for these three distinct capabilities when they’re assessing governance:

“ Most of our clients today use their own Excel spreadsheets ... but moving to a real-time dashboard is huge.” —MIKE BOZEK, Elekta AB

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■n They need to see that a tool allows them to assign specific privileges to users based on predetermined roles.

■n The tool should allow for data to be clearly labeled according to whether it is enter-prise data that has been validated or if it is user-generated and, hence, potentially compromised.

■n Self-service tools need to address data

preparation. Allowing users to connect to multiple data stores and work with disparate data in one platform will inevitably change the data being used. This process must be controlled.

“Things can get out of control, but there are best practices,” Evelson explained. “The middle of the road is where you can empower business users to be self-sufficient but monitor what’s going on.” —Ed Burns

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FACES SELF-SERVICE,

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TAKE CHARGE

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DATA GOVERNANCE

CDOs Take Charge on Data Accessibility

The question of what data to liberate for use in self-service analytics applications and what data to lock down continues to vex many businesses. Most organizations today would like to consider themselves data-driven, and at the heart of that posture is often a self-service ecosystem that gives large numbers of users access to data and the ability to analyze it. At the same time, large-scale data breaches con-tinue to dominate headlines, highlighting the risks of open access.

For Nicholas Marko, chief data officer at Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa., it’s up to CDOs like him to figure out how to strike the balance between data accessibility and security. Speaking at the 2015 MIT Chief Data Officer & Information Quality Sympo-sium in Cambridge, Mass., in July 2015, Marko said responsibility for an organization’s data strategy isn’t really a good fit for anyone else. It requires more strategic thinking than IT

departments typically are used to and is less focused on the traditional domain of CIOs—the selection of new hardware and software—he added. But he sees it as a good match for chief data officers (CDOs), whose job descrip-tions are still being written in many organiza-tions but generally include responsibilities related to the strategic use of data.

Finding the proper balance between acces-sibility and security is crucial to the success of business intelligence efforts. The easiest way to protect data is to lock it away behind a firewall, but the more layers of security you add, the more difficult it is for users to access information. That can hamper data sharing and self-service business intelligence and analytics projects.

Working in healthcare, Marko said he’s seen the pendulum swing too far in the direction of locking down data. This is partly due to par-ticularities of the industry, which is governed

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by the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a law that specifies strict patient privacy requirements. In many cases, “the problem isn’t securing data,” he said. “Sometimes the problem is un-securing data.”

BREACHES BREED CAUTION

Not every industry faces the same kind of reg-ulatory stick when it comes to protecting data. But with the large number of high-profile data breaches in the past few years, more and more businesses in less-regulated industries are also seeking to minimize their risks. Even without the threat of regulatory punishment, there’s still the risk of reputational harm—as well as possible financial losses and legal liabilities—that can come from a breach.

That’s not to say balancing data accessibil-ity and security is a glamorous task. Identify-ing sensitive data that needs tight protections and figuring out which employee roles should be granted access to data can be political and time-consuming. Business departments often control their own systems and don’t want any-one telling them they’re going to have limited

access to the data in those systems.Derek Strauss, CDO at online brokerage TD

Ameritrade Inc., said during a session at the conference that when he first took on his cur-rent role four years ago, he didn’t want to go anywhere near the issue of data accessibility because it was so political. But he added that he came to see it as a central function of his role. No one in the organization is better positioned to bring together heads of different depart-ments and help them come to a consensus on accessibility versus security, Strauss said. “The CDO has to step into that role and orchestrate the solutions.”

SOME SEPARATION NATURAL

The biggest thing a CDO can do to support a healthy balance between access and security is to partition data logically through classifica-tions and privilege settings, conference speak-ers advised. Marko said that identifying and classifying data according to metadata tags can be helpful. Mark Ramsey, CDO at U.K.-based pharmaceutical maker GlaxoSmithKline, said setting access privileges based on report type

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is also a good way to maintain access control through partitioning.

For example, Ramsey said that reports about a company’s financial statements are highly sensitive and shouldn’t be shared widely

throughout the organization. On the other hand, location-based marketing data is usually rather general and, therefore, not all that sen-sitive—as a result, there’s less at stake when

it is accessed by users. “All data is not created equal,” he said.

Not everyone agrees that balancing data accessibility against security should be within the purview of the CDO. Eugene Kolker, CDO at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said during the same panel discussion in which Marko took part that his organization and many oth-ers already have a chief information security officer. In his view, the CDO should be more focused on making sure employees understand the data they have access to and are knowledge-able about the tools they have at their disposal. It would effectively be doubling up on that per-son’s efforts for CDOs to engage so heavily in the realm of data security, Kolker noted. “The CDO can’t do everything,” he said. —Ed Burns

Identifying sensitive data that needs tight protections and figur-ing out which employees should be granted access to data can be political and time-consuming.

HOME

EDITOR’S NOTE

BI DATA GOVERNANCE

FACES SELF-SERVICE,

BIG DATA HURDLES

SELF-SERVICE

ANALYTICS NEEDS

ASSISTANCE FROM

GOVERNANCE

CDOs

TAKE CHARGE

ON DATA

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORSED BURNS covers business intelligence, analytics and data visualization technologies and topics for Search-BusinessAnalytics. Before joining the site, he wrote for SearchHealthIT, covering federal electronic health record policy, health information exchanges and emerg-ing health IT-related business practices. Email him at eburns@techtarget.com and follow him on Twitter: @EdBurnsTT.

CRAIG STEDMAN is executive editor of SearchBusiness-Analytics and SearchDataManagement. He has been an IT journalist for 30 years and was an editor and reporter at Computerworld before joining TechTarget in 2009. Email him at cstedman@techtarget.com and follow him on Twitter: @craigstedman.

Pair BI and Analytics With Data Governance is a SearchDataManagement.com e-publication.

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