Effects

Take finance as an example. Without data governance, the financial system suffers from a wide range of problems. For example, when IT systems are siloed, a single goal may require operations across multiple systems, which is far too inefficient. In one example, revenue management required data to be exported from 5 different systems and took 11 persons and 50 hours to process. Without data governance, obtaining data can be extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive.

With data governance, an initial draft of a monthly financial report can be generated within 3 days, and the final draft can be ready in 5. An annual report draft can be prepared in 11 days. Though it is not easy to get the ledger right for a large international organization, especially one that operates in more than 170 countries and regions, data governance can make it possible. To efficiently generate accurate and complete financial reports, a highly integrated global financial management system is indispensable, and so is data governance. By automating transaction accounting, optimizing ERP and data scheduling, monitoring data quality, and improving the performance of data analysis platforms, Huawei has made its international finances transparent in real time. The accounting process is traceable and manageable.

Figure 1 Practice