Data Governance Tools

Data governance is the formulation of policy to optimize, secure, and leverage information as an enterprise asset by aligning the objectives of multiple functions. Data governance programs have traditionally focused on people and process. Cost has historically been a key consideration because data governance programs have often started from scratch, with little to no funding. As a result, Microsoft Excel and SharePoint have been the tools of choice to document and share data governance artifacts. While the marginal cost of these tools is zero, they are often missing critical functionality. Meanwhile, vendors have matured their data governance offerings to the extent that organizations need to consider tools as a critical component of their data governance programs.

It is not always clear, however, what "data governance tools" really means. In this book, data governance expert Sunil Soares reviews a reference architecture for data governance software tools. He seeks to define the category called "data governance," as well as lay out evaluation criteria for software tools, the vendor landscape, and the alignment with big data.

The book contains five sections:

• "Introduction (to Data Governance and EDM)" introduces data governance and the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) reference architecture.
• "Categories of Data Governance Tools" discusses key data governance tasks that can be automated by tools for business glossaries-metadata management-data profiling-data quality management-master data management-reference data management-and information policy management.
• "The Integration Between Enterprise Data Management and Data Governance Tools" provides an overview of the integration points between EDM tools and data governance. EDM tools relate to data modeling-data integration-analytics and reporting-business process management-data security and privacy-and information lifecycle management.
• "Big Data Governance Tools" looks at how data governance tools interact with big data technologies-including Hadoop-NoSQL-stream computing-and text analytics.
• "Evaluation Criteria and the Vendor Landscape" discusses evaluation criteria for data governance tools and provides an overview of key vendor platforms-including ASG-Collibra-Global IDs-IBM-Informatica-Orchestra Networks-SAP-and Talend.