Entries Tagged 'Data Governance' ↓

Over the next 5 days I’m going to give you step-by-step, practical advice for building a Data Maturity Model. A Data Maturity Model is a rating system applied to a group of data (by element), such as enterprise, marketing, or in-scope data. There is no one-size fits-all rating system nor an industry standard because the real value comes in tailoring your maturity to the exact needs of your organization.

So, over the next five days I’m going give you steps that you can follow to build a maturity model that works for your organization and is very powerful in tracking the progress of your Data Governance Program. You’ll remember from my post on data governance metrics that it is extremely important to know where you’ve been, where you are, and where you are going.

Now, onto the steps for a maturity model… Continue reading →

Below are some articles are resources that you can use to broaden you knowledge of Data Governance. Feel free to leave a comment with any other links you think may be useful to other readers.

Articles

Data Governance at a Malaysian Financial Institution
An article about Eon Bank, a company that had no Data Governance until June 2006. They implemented BI solutions from SAS to get a single view of the customer.
http://computerworld.com.my/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=5841&pubid=4&issueid=119

IBM Acquires Princeton Softech
This acquisition happened a couple of weeks ago and shows how IBM is really bulking up on their Data Governance offerings. This is just another example of the trend for organizations to adopt Data Governance.
http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=22309

An Introduction to Master Data Management
A nice, clear article about Master Data Management.
http://www.sda-india.com/sda_india/psecom,id,25,site_layout,sdaindia,articles,601,p,0.html
Continue reading →

Just a reminder to register for the free Data Governance Webinar by clicking here.

Its only an hour, and judging from the success that UMB Bank has experienced and the awards they have won, its certain to be worth your time. Register here.

I got an email after my post on Tuesday about working with your Data Modelers. It was from a guy who works at a mid-size company that runs pretty lean, meaning he doesn’t have much support from the IT staff because they are busy on other projects. He said he didn’t have data modeling tools at his disposal, so how can he track his Data Governance Program for the long-term?

I thought about this for a while. I’m so used to a large corporation where there are lots of tools and resources available (although they aren’t waiting for you to ask them to do something) so I had to think about this one for a bit…. What would I do if I was in his situation?
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I recently updated the Wikipedia Data Governance listing to display “Maximize the income generation potential of data” as one of the key reasons a company undertakes Data Governance. The other items they had listed, before my update, were to:

- Increase consistency & confidence in decision making
- Decrease the risk of regulatory fines
- Improve data security
Continue reading →

On August 16, 2007 a new webinar titled ‘Award-Winning UMB Bank Case Study: High Quality Customer Data Across the Enterprise’, will showcase UMB Bank’s best practices, tips, and lessons learned on Data Governance. UMB Bank won the 2007 Data Warehousing Institute Business Intelligence Best Practices Award in the Data Governance category, so they are certainly worth listening to because they have been highly successful. You’re certain to get a few items that you can quickly apply to your program. I highly recommend attending this, and to do so you just need to register today - its super easy…

You can go straight to the webinar registration area by clicking here or by pointing your browser to http://www.trilliumsoftware.com/home/events/web-events.aspx

If Data Governance is your program/project to manage, think of the Data Modeling Team and their tools as your foundation. A good Data Governance Program needs to be built atop a top-notch Data Model. Sure, you can have Data Governance without a good data model, it’ll just be a lot harder and a lot more time consuming. See this post on data governance failures for a recent study stating a high percentage of Data Governance programs fail - and my thoughts on that.
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Its important to take notes on everything! This is a general project management tip that is of particular use for Data Governance. Because this is YOUR program, you need to know what works and what doesn’t so that 2 years from now, when things are getting a little sluggish and you need to spice it up, you can revert back to your notes and see…”ahhh, That time we had a meeting and broke into working groups to fix 4 different items in one meeting was really successful and got everyone involved”. You are going to be doing so much with your program that you just won’t be able to remember everything. So, you’ll want to take notes on what works and what doesn’t!

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Projects and Programs fail for a variety of reasons.  Data Governance is a particularly tough program, and I’d like to see as many programs succeed as possible.  Below are the top reasons I’ve seen that have caused Data Governance programs to fail.

1. No Success Shown
A good way to kill your program is to show no success out of the gate. Very quickly people will become disinterested, restless, and you’ll notice participate will wane. To prevent this, get a quick win that really excites upper management as well as the stewards. Fix a pain point for them or clean up something that everyone knows is a problem. Whatever you do, get a quick win.

2. Loss of Executive Buy-in
This can happen for a lot of reasons, including the other 7 listed here, so the key to this is to keep your executive sponsors up-to-date and engaged. You can do this through traditional status reporting as well as drop-in meetings and updates when you have success. Have a communication plan that keeps your executive sponsor and interested upper management engaged and updated.

3. Not Having a Proper Foundation
A recent article that I blogged on stated that 80% of Data Governance projects fail. Now, I’m not knocking the authors or anything, but the conclusions that were drawn were pretty obvious. If you start Data Governance before you have the proper foundation you are going to fail. A proper foundation includes proper data management for your organization, data models, metadata, etc. Basically, you need to at least have the basic foundation for what Data Governance will indeed govern. If you don’t have metadata, for instance, wouldn’t you first start a Metadata project to build up your data dictionary before starting your Data Governance Program? I would.
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It is important that your Data Governance program stay visible throughout the organization. This means getting out there and doing presentations, getting your talking points in whenever the opportunity presents itself, volunteering to speak at all-hands meetings and business team meetings, etc. A few posts back I talked about the much needed ‘Elevator Speech‘ and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have those ready at a moments notice. Additionally though, you’ll need talking points and presentations that last 15-30 minutes and longer for meetings with other IT and Business units, high level executive presentation, mid-level business teams, and any other audience where Data Governance can bring value.
Continue reading →