Over the past five-ten years, most business leaders have seen that data is a critical asset, but they have struggled to implement effective management of this asset; valuation of it has been even more elusive. Without oversight and valuation, it becomes extremely difficult for an organization to use their data to make informed decisions. Data that does not conform to any standards of quality, consistency or sharability is not valuable, and decisions made based on ungoverned data can be problematic.

This column is being addressed to you, the analyst so let’s first define the role of an analyst. An analyst looks at data and produces information – hopefully actionable – running queries and reports, of ten using powerful and sophisticated tools such as Cognos, Business Objects, Microstrategy and SAS. The analyst can report to IT or report directly to a business sponsor.

Across healthcare, the demand and pressures for access to data are now overwhelming organizations. In many organizations, the only access to structured data for performing analysis was being conducted by the resources in Finance. More recently, the demands for providing external reporting of core measures and demonstration of meaningful use have inundated organizations while the financial pressures facing the world have forced organizations to look at business operations for process improvement. In organizations where research has been conducted, access to data has historically often been finding it any way you can, exposing security and privacy gaps.

In this first of a series of articles on the Semantic Web and EIM (of which, this is the first), I will explore how the Semantic Web and semantic technologies will impact the different components of EIM. In this article I will discuss how the Semantic Web and semantic technologies can help enable perhaps the most critical aspect of EIM: Data Governance and Stewardship.