For many organizations, titles are one of the ways that performance is distinguished or acknowledged, while in other organizations there is no coherence in how different people’s activities are classified. In many efforts, a title does not “mean” anything outside the particular environment, but in the world of data governance, a title can convey deep meanings.

Without an enterprise-wide MME, your organization does not have a common understanding of the data across its systems. How do you build an enterprise-wide application (that is, a customer relationship management (CRM), a data warehousing, or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system) without an enterprise-view understanding of the data? The answer for most companies is that they can’t.

Throughout the years, I have seen as many different ways of building IT and business organizations to support data warehousing efforts as I have seen data warehousing architectures. Inasmuch as the establishment of an effective architecture is critical to success, so is the establishment of an organization that works specifically to satisfy your data warehousing needs and is successful within your organization’s culture. I frequently receive questions related to this topic from resources that have read articles or attended classes and yet still struggle to define how it should work in their organization.

At a recent data warehouse (DW) conference, the discussion centered on the incredible explosion of the size of DW databases. Many companies are already implementing in the multiple terabyte range and it’s almost a macho boast that “my DW database is bigger than yours.” There seem to be few who question the unbridled growth or ask if all that data is really needed or if the data will even be accessed.