Using Effective Data Governance To Provide Uninterrupted Service During Business Realignment

Background & Challenges

A global publicly traded organization split into two companies and required a strategy to properly inventory, classify, and separate its data assets, as well as a process to intake, approve, migrate, and verify fulfillment requests for data transfers.

 

Approach

BDO inventoried the data to gain an understanding of its origin, purpose, format, and relationships and then classified the data according to sensitivity and criticality. BDO designed a risk-based framework to support separation decisions and enriched data classification elements based on the framework to inform the data separation strategy via scoring and decision trees. With the data inventoried and classified, and aligned with the separation framework, BDO designed and built a comprehensive data request and fulfilment process enabling both the initial separation as well as ongoing data fulfilment requests.

 

Client Impact

Through BDO’s data inventory, classification, and separation strategy services, the client was able to align data ownership, access, and use during and after the companies split – allowing their data consumers uninterrupted access to the right data, while minimizing risk of improper access, redundancy, and data leakage.