The Importance of Data Governance and Executive Sponsorship

Proper data governance and cleaning up the IT estate are no tasks people happily jump on. It needs to have a high-level sponsor to be implemented and lived in the organization. The success of it will speak for itself though. Less cost, less risk and free resource to focus on business innovations.

One might think people would be happy if old applications and the trouble with it were taken out of their hands. Why is not everyone / every company doing it then or why are we pointing out the importance of sponsorship for data archiving and application decommissioning?

Why Data Governance Feels Like Cleaning Out the Basement

As all or at least most of us are not really motivated to clean up our house or especially the basement with all the dust-covered boxes from ancient times, data governance and application decommissioning faces a similar challenge. Without clear direction form the top legacy applications would keep on running and data is just kept the way it is. This (as a first step) seems the most convenient way of keeping data available, until the issues with either hardware, software, security or support start pilling up.

This is the point when top or higher management must step in and give clear guidance on data governance and application decommissioning. The aim is to have guidelines of what data to keep for how long and where to archive the data to. All, to ensure compliance requirements or in lots of cases also internal needs for information (e.g. for maintenance of old machinery) are met and post-productive applications can be shut down. Later, being infrastructure that is vulnerable and could expose the company to high risk (e.g. security issues) and cost (e.g. fines because of tax audits with data not being available, since application is down).

The Opportunities of Data Governance and Decommissioning

The relevant aspect is the data, not the application. Pointing this out, the story can be turned around and made much more appealing to management than just talking about risk and cost savings. Let’s look at the opportunities data governance and applications decommissioning can bring. Getting rid of old applications will reduce cost and risk, considering that an average of 15% or overall IT budget is spent on legacy IT. This will result in:

1. Free budget that will either increase profits or can be used for innovation to outperform the competition

2. Free resources in IT to focus on business relevant needs and the time to dive into latest technology

3. Future oriented IT landscape, open for latest technology

Rules for Success: Planning and Centralised Execution

To make application decommissioning a success only a few rules need to be followed. Have sponsorship from the top granting authority and budget. This way global guidelines can be established and application decommissioning including data archiving can be managed properly. Especially data archiving should be run from a central team with standardized process to ensure quality, efficiency and smooth operations.

Experience shows leaving data governance and application decommissioning to local units, the changes for success are fairly small with enough examples to prove this case.

Another rule that will make a huge difference is to make sure that with every implementation of a new application, the plan for decommissioning of the “left behind” application is planned and budgeted for.

Bottom line, don´t we all feel better, after we cleaned up at home and everything is tidy and neat? Same in this scenario. All it takes is a little push and support from the top, resulting in big savings and far less worries. This in turn allows higher focus on the relevant aspects in business to support innovation an growth