Many organizations looking to implement and information governance programs rely on a "center of excellence” model, where a handful of high-level managers set enterprise-wide data policies and a group of assigned data stewards enforce those policies. While this approach certainly serves as a clearinghouse for all things data, it may not be the most efficient way to meet the rapidly changing needs of today's organizations.
Data – coming from a vast array of complex sources – has now evolved to include a multitude of structured and unstructured forms, new data classifications to meet regulatory requirements and increasingly, employees outside of IT tasked with data governance tasks.
The next natural step in unlocking the full potential of effective information governance lies in the concept of Crowdsourcing. Used by organizations seeking to leverage a broader range of data stakeholders, Crowdsourcing can create a more dynamic and collaborative process throughout the organization – connecting executives, managers and data stewards alike.
A crowdsourced information governance approach engages an organization’s full breadth of data stakeholders and applies techniques such as natural language processing and machine learning to guide less experienced data contributors. This allows organizations to react in real time to rapidly changing business requirements.
A major force driving information governance and data management initiatives is the need to treat data as an asset. Looking at data as an asset means focusing on increasing the “value” of that asset through active management of data policies and the enforcement of those policies. Handling all of these complex tasks through a small CoE with particular individuals taking ownership over different elements of ERP data sorted by vendor, customer, material and other master data objects simply won’t scale, and key employees often suffer from “CoE burnout” as a result.
This siloed approach was designed to minimize human errors, with requests for corrections going directly to the CoE with occasional outreach to other data stakeholders. IT was also involved in fulfilling requests from business users who needed specific analytics data or an Excel document to be exported for fed into a data warehouse.
As new dimensions of data have arisen and hybrid IT landscapes with best-of-breed applications have become the norm, CoEs (regardless of size) and IT teams are now becoming overwhelmed with a barrage of new requests that compete with their ability to fulfill their primary job responsibilities. To meet the needs of the business while remaining agile, responsive and dynamic, organizations need to shift toward sharing the load among a larger group of enterprise data stakeholders.
Crowdsourcing has been widely recognized as an effective method for driving social change, raising awareness and funds for charitable causes, and affecting change in government policies.
