First of all, what is personal data?
According to the privacy act personal data is defined as: “Personal data are all data that identify or can identify an individual directly”. That is quite a broad definition and may have some surprising implications. Just to give you an idea, a professional work number is considered personal data as well.
The purpose of GDPR act is to govern the protection of personal data when it is being processed in any way.
How can you achieve this?
The Belgian privacy commission provided a 13-step approach as a guideline. A brief overview can be found here.
Most of these steps are to create procedures, checks and accountability for storing, retaining and processing data. An important aspect is of course step number 2 the Record of Processing Activities: “You should map what personal data you hold where it came from and who you share it with and set up a record of your processing activities. You may need to organize an information audit.”
So, where is the data stored?
Here we come to the subject of data inventory and in a broader sense data ownership. The trouble is that there are often technical constraints involved in processing the data and maintain data goverance is not easy to coordinate or prioritize.
- Business does not always know how data is transformed and duplicated.
- IT is not always aware of the juridical necessity and business needs.
- Data ownership is not always clearly defined.
How do we solve this?
SAP Information Steward is a product specifically built for bridging the gap between business and IT. It provides a complete tool set for data profiling, quality and cleansing. It allows IT to delegate the ownership, governance, data quality and cleansing operations to (key) users in business.
- Discover. Its powerful data rule engine is excellent for tagging GDPR impacted data fields. It allows for creating a data register with ease. Increasing the cost efficiency of maintaining the register.
- Define. It has a built-in meta data repository storing definition, purpose, validation and GDPR compliancy specific information. It allows accountability and clear data ownership.
- Lineage. The ability to trace a data field through all processes from source to end user reports and back. With one click of a button you can generate an impact analysis across the entire system.
- Monitor. The business users are valuable assets to increase data quality and fix issues. The Data cleansing packages can be used in Data Services by IT which again saves time and effort.
SAP Information Steward integrates seamlessly with Data Services and BusinessObjects and can be used for both SAP and non- SAP source data. Its purpose is to implement data governance across the organization. End-to-end. From the data sources to the end user reports and anything in between.
With SAP Information steward you can easily compile and maintain a data register avoiding repetitive manual and error-prone work.
So keep calm and contact us for any more information on how to roll out SAP Information Steward in your organization.
