Thanks for the excellent comments, as you say it is essential for an organisation wide (or at least directorate wide) functional review to ensure that you are only managing required data.

Sometimes I have seen practitioners busy ‘polishing’ existing data and claiming great success/progress etc. as this is easier to achieve than taking the wider view.

Senior managers and executives should ensure that their teams have analysed the current business data requirements before engaging in other data improvement activities.

Julian

The simple rule that makes it easy to ascertain what data is required is, “The only data that an enterprise should hold is that required to support the Business Functions of the enterprise – nothing more, nothing”.

It is critical to differentiate here between Business Functions and Processes. The former are the core activities of the enterprise, the latter the sequence in which these activities need to be performed in order to arrive at a particular business outcome.

Functions (not Processes) create, use and transform all enterprise data. By doing a CRUD matrix (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for each Business Function, an enterprise will know exactly what data is required to be held and can archive everything else.

When “polishing up” their data, enterprises ought also be aware of The Pitfalls of Data Re-Use

Regards
John