My post on the implications of customer experience management for BI has driven considerable debate on LinkedIn. Comments are still being added two months later,

In general, participants agreed that BI projects (like any data intensive projects) require collaboration between business and IT for success – this collaboration is necessary entirely independently of who owns or “controls” the outputs.

This collaboration can be achieved through data governance – as described in the post Data Governance in a Big Data World.

A related theme – through collaboration IT shifts from cost centre to business enabler.

Data governance, if properly implemented, is primarily intended to create context for data and ensure that IT is delivering according to business needs and priorities.

Of course, this relevance may extend beyond BI to ensuring that  other data intensive projects – such as ERP, CRM and MDM projects also are defined and deployed according to business needs. Data governance ensures that applications use data as the business intended, and help to ensure the engagement of business stakeholders in the application deployment.

Data governance, therefore, adds value to IT through ensuring that IT is seen to be business centric

What do you think?