The other day I was in a meeting with a client and there was an argument about who owns the data. Those arguing were IT people. In this scenario, the assumption was that data from source systems would flow into and integrate with a data warehouse.

I found the discussion very interesting. Here are some of the assumptions I noted during the debate, followed by a few observations.

Assumptions

1. IT is the group that extracts or subscribes to the data from the source systems. IT also designs the extract process and the target data stores.
2. IT developers are the ones who integrate, merge, check quality and propagate the data to the layers in the data warehouse.
3. IT and infrastructure set up the development, test and production platforms.
4. IT, with business consumers, set up the testing scenarios.
5. Production support (based on IT specifications) sets up and meets any security requirements for the data.
6. IT manages the quality of the data from the source systems.
   1. Assumption is there's a process in place to continually correct the quality of the source system data – that must be an ongoing task. Data does NOT get better unless we help it.
7. IT is responsible for the consumption and use of technical and business metadata.

Observations

1. From the IT perspective, they own almost every aspect of data movement, integration and set up.
2. Funding, in many companies, is by project and not necessarily set up for ongoing maintenance of the data or the tasks associated with monitoring.
3. IT usually gets blamed if the data is not exactly the way the business users want to see and use it.
4. Why are business consumers not involved in the entire process? Soup to Nuts!
   

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