How can GCCs help organizations unlock the power of data?

As organizations become increasingly data centric, Global Capability Centers (GCCs) can fulfil the critical role of centrally governing and transforming their vast data resources.

Today’s business enterprises are operating in a dynamic environment, driven by data. Big data has transformed how businesses operate and compete by providing a wealth of information for decision making. While the primary focus of organizations has been on data science and business intelligence, the quality of the data being analyzed could, in fact, be the most crucial factor. The rather subtle maxim “garbage in, garbage out” is applicable to any data analysis exercise. As data science becomes more important in business operations, leaders would need to prioritize data governance. 

The relevance of data governance

Data governance refers to the framework that defines and enforces policies, procedures, and responsibilities for managing an organization’s data. It aims to ensure that quality data is always available and easily accessible for informed decision making. An enterprise level data governance strategy is critical for a data driven business enterprise.

Global Capability Centers (GCCs) and the data governance agenda

Global Capability Centers (GCCs) have a crucial role to play in ensuring that data is governed effectively, and a ‘single source of truth’ is maintained across the organization. By creating a Data Center of Excellence (CoE) at their GCCs, organizations can effectively drive their data governance agenda. This includes activities such as: 

1. Data custodianship and stewardship

Processing of master data items is a role widely supported by GCCs today. This includes activities, such as creation, deletion, and modification of master data items. In addition, several GCCs today are also functioning as data custodians and stewards. As stewards, GCCs are acting as subject matter experts, educating and guiding business users on data policy and standards, and as custodians, they ensure that all master data items meet the standards and framework created for the organization.

By including this additional governance layer at GCCs, organizations have been able to place better control on master data at its source, confirming enforcement of rules and standards centrally.

2. Data policy and framework management

Policies and frameworks are essential foundational elements for effective data governance across an organization. High-quality data creation and processing requires well-defined rules and policies, such as clearly defined data elements, business rules, data models and data lineages, among other aspects. Developing such policies, frameworks and business rules requires a global, cross-functional perspective and strong data domain expertise that can easily be accessed through GCCs.

5. Data quality improvement

Data quality improvement is a comprehensive task which requires support from multiple stakeholders across regions as well as a detailed understanding of the underlying data. This is where GCCs are playing a key role, acting as pivots for data quality improvement. A GCC can, for example, perform regular data audits to assess the overall data quality across data types and co-ordinate with different business data owners to resolve issues and improve data quality. On the other hand, GCCs can also take up independent data enrichment and cleansing exercises, leveraging their specialized domain knowledge to plug holes in historical datasets.

6. Data migration and integration

A major hurdle for large global organizations attempting to create a comprehensive data lake is the lack of unified global systems, with regional and business level variations existing in ERP systems as well as other tools and applications. Successful systems unification requires seamless data migration from legacy to target systems, with minimal impact on business operations. This is an activity that GCCs are driving centrally, leveraging on their experience working with multiple systems across functions and businesses.