An article I co-authored with Gregory S. Dawson (Arizona State University) and James S. Denford (Royal Military College of Canada) appears in the current issue of the Cutter Business Technology Journal.
We focus our article on a fundamental organizational question: in a medium-to-large organization, should data governance be centralized or decentralized (or, possibly, federated)? There are pros and cons for both centralization and decentralization. The overall business strategy needs to be considered: in some conglomerates of disparate business lines, there may be little commonality to the information being managed by the various divisions. However, decentralization still causes duplication of effort and risks inconsistencies across the enterprise. The authors give concrete examples that link the IT governance modality — centralized or decentralized — with performance outcomes. They generally favor a centralized model and provide the reader with specific recommendations on how to centralize data governance in organizations and how to implement this model successfully.
The article is available here.