For today’s data-driven organizations the key challenges inherent in managing compliance and business risk while meeting business objectives are primarily shaped in relation to the ever-increasing value and complexity of enterprise information assets.
An organization’s processes, policies, and governance programs must keep pace with this increasing growth and complexity. Yet, demands arising from business goals, regulators, consumers, and business partners have created an environment of urgency, confusion, and disjointed approaches to data governance.
As a result, corporate executives, compliance officers, information technology executives, risk managers, and security officers face many challenges in ensuring the effective use of data and information resources to meet business objectives.

Among the most critical of these challenges are:

• How to implement a compliance and data governance program in a cost-effective, strategic, and intelligent manner, given the interplay of strategic and business objectives, organizational risk, and compliance requirements.
• How to ensure that governance programs include data systems, information handling practices, data processes, employees, business partners, and corporate affiliates.
• How to improve and optimize governance programs to reduce gaps between data-policies and actual practices using approaches consistent with efforts to achieve organization business process improvement goals, and deliver cost-effective solutions.

As an enterprise wide endeavour, any solution designed to meet these and similar challenges must address the specific as well as the general needs of the constituents of governance management. Among these constituents are:

	Executive and Senior Management Can include CIOs, CEOs, General Counsel, business unit or divisional heads, and board members;
	Compliance Staff Can include Chief Privacy Officers, Data Protection Officers, Data Stewards, Legal Departments, and Law Department;
	Corporate & IT Audit Can include internal and external auditors, IT auditors, security auditors, or IT Governance staff;
	Security Officers Can include CSOs, CISO, Data Security specialists, and application or information security staff;
	Database Analysts & Architects Can include data architects, analysts, database administrators, and information architects, as well as data warehouse staff; and
	Risk Managers Can include Chief Risk Officer, and many of the constituents above with assigned risk management responsibilities and accountabilities.

With the increased demands of board members, shareholders, and regulators, executive managers must not only ensure that data governance programs are in place, continually attest to the state of internal controls, and improve the performance of governance programs, but also ensure that data assets are being leveraged to increase shareholder value.

Some of the specific challenges that executive managers face with respect to data governance programs are:

• Be able to verify and attest that data assets, data policies, and the inventories of data handling practices are being tracked, managed, and that appropriate audit mechanisms are in place.
• Be able to measure and improve the corporate performance of governance programs including risk reduction, return on investments, and total cost of ownership of governance solutions.
• Have clear visibility into all levels of governance programs and compliance activities, and be able to hold the organization accountable for the effectiveness of these programs.
• Ensure that the organization is equipped with the proper expertise, tools, and executive sponsorship to meet the performance and strategic goals of governance mandates.

The Align suite can help organizations and their executive managers address these challenges by providing:

• Centralized reporting on all aspects of a data governance and compliance program including data inventories, data policies, and data handling activities. These reports include key metrics such as performance criteria, risk levels, accountable staff, and trend based reporting to assist tracking and improving the performance of compliance programs.
• Drill-down management dashboards that show key metrics for performance, real-time alerts for significant events, and aggregate reporting on compliance programs by department, data asset, business unit, jurisdiction, or business partner.
• Track and provide historical journaling of policy changes, instant impact assessments of pending policy changes, as well as immediate review and re-assessment of existing data-practices when policy changes occur.

If you would like to speak with a Synomos representative regarding Align please contact us.