I’m just coming back from our (great) yearly company kick-off which reminded me of this interesting blog post, “Who owns the data?”, by Philip Howard.
There are really two aspects to this question. First is the challenge of day to day usage and governance. Second is legal ownership (which I’ll cover in a later post).
So who owns the data? Business? Or IT? As Philip writes, business owns the data but IT has the key. So it’s as if you own your house but have to go to your neighbor to unlock the front door.
I have visited many companies where line of business managers work with their data through business applications. They develop new ideas on how to improve the business which leads to further analysis modeling and business case development. In other words, they need to use the same data but in a new context. However, they can’t get to the data. IT usually has a huge backlog so at best they have to wait 6-12 months, but then it’s too late. So they end up reverting to a lot of manual cut-and-paste.
Isn’t it absurd that you can own data, and even work with the data every day in your application interfaces, but then not be able to get the data when you need it?
Luckily there is a solution. Web Data Services eliminates the disconnect between LOB and IT. It allows IT to easily and automatically access not only the data but also the meta data and business logic via HTML/AJAX web application front-ends. So essentially if you can see the data using accepted standard access credentials in a browser, you can now also access, enrich, and load the data into any BI tool for LOB to use.
Philip also talks about “information and data governance”, processes that ensure the quality and relevance of data. Be careful not to depend on outsourced black box solutions to deliver static data feeds based upon fixed requirements. You need to make real-time decisions based on real-time data. Therefore you need a product or tool that can deliver timely, relevant, customized data while giving you complete data governance control. Kapow Web Data Server allows line of business and content owners to do exactly that. Give it a try!
By: Stefan Andreasen 
