Evaluation Criteria

Eckerson Group has defined 16 criteria for evaluating and select the most suitable data governance platform for your organization. Most of these emanate from the data governance platform framework in the prior section.

To facilitate your evaluation and selection process, we have created an interactive spreadsheet that you can download to score and compare vendors according to our criteria. Feel free to modify the criteria, add your own criteria, and adjust the weighting to create a custom score sheet to support your selection process.

Screenshot of our Evaluation Spreadsheet for Data Governance Platforms

youtu.be/LTlZcS_3yMk

Wayne Eckerson reviews the criteria your organization should use when evaluating data governance platforms.

Download Evaluation Spreadsheet

The 16 criteria are:

Data governance portal

One place to go for data owners, data stewards, data curators, and data consumers to obtain information about the data governance program or find links to applications to submit requests or perform data governance work.

Data governance search

A universal search function to search the data catalog, the portal, or other metadata repositories.

Decision rights

An application that defines, documents, and in some cases, enforces permissions to perform various data governance tasks.

Data catalog

A metadata repository that collects and organizes information about enterprise data assets, including data sets, views, queries, reports, and AI models. A data catalog addresses the need for data discovery, privacy management, data security, and self-service analytics, among other things.

Business glossary

An application that provides a consolidated list of business terms and concepts to support a common business language. The glossary enables business users to draft, edit, finalize, and store definitions of key terms and metrics and make them available to employees and applications via an API.

Policy and compliance management

An application that enables business users to manage the lifecycle of policies from creation to implementation, monitoring, maintenance, and eventual removal.

Risk management

An application that enables business users to submit issues, risks, and requests that data stewards and administrators can prioritize, assign, track, and develop plans to resolve.

Data governance reporting

A custom, interactive dashboard that tracks the progress of data governance tasks, projects, and initiatives and displays KPIs that show how well the data governance program is meeting its goals and objectives.

Collaboration

Integration with collaboration tools, such as Slack, Jira, Sharepoint, and email to facilitate information sharing and agile decision making.

Data governance operations

The procedures, workflows and automation required to efficiently execute data governance administrative tasks including prioritization, decision making, communications, escalations, and approvals.

Data management

The functions that ensure the creation, storage, integration, protection and delivery of quality data in alignment with data governance policies, rules, standards, and processes.

Time to value

Templates, starter kits, and professional services that accelerate the time required to deploy the data governance platform and gain adoption for its use.

Integration.

Prebuilt and custom APIs to integrate third party applications, such as BI tools, collaboration tools, and data catalogs.

Vendor viability

Indicators of a vendor’s financial and market strength to ensure they have the resources to execute on their product vision and properly support customers.

Pricing

The pricing model vendors use to charge for their platform. Do they charge by user, CPU, platform, sources, integrations?

Infrastructure

Does the platform run on-premises, in the cloud, or a combination? Which components run where? Can the platform span multiple clouds and on-premises locations to support a single data domain?

View the 16 evaluation criteria.