Entries Tagged 'Good Tip' ↓

I found this great data governance white paper via a press release. It surveyed many different companies working on data governance and compiled the findings into fascinating results. Take a look at the PDF here.

The last session that I wanted to write about was titled, “A Business Value-Driven Approach to Data Quality” and was presented by Richard Trapp from Avaya. For those of you don’t know of Avaya (I suspect most of you do, as you probably have one of their phones sitting right next to you), they were spun off from Lucent and are now a leading business communications technology provider. Richard started the DQ program at Avaya and went about doing it in a very unique way — every effort he makes is focused on the trackable dollar value it brings back to the business.
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Wednesday at the conference began the series of shorter sessions. The day kicked-off with the one-hour keynote from Elizabeth Kirscher, President of Morningstar’s Data Services Business. Her presentation, titled “When Data Quality Drives Revenue“, centered around the accomplishments of Morningstar in the data management field and the road that they took to get there. Elizabeth’s background was in sales, so when she began leading the Data Services Business she didn’t quite have the technical background that one would associate with that position. This just goes to show that many data issues reside on the business side, not in IT. In her tenure at Morningstar, where her team is seen as a profit center (lucky her!), she has gone through many regulation and standardizations as well as mergers and acquisitions. Listening to her stories about these business moves was very interesting.
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One document that is an absolute must-have for your program is the “Data Governance Policy Document”. This is a document that states what the Data Governance Office (and council) will not allow. It can also state what you do allow, but I’ve found its easier to just list what is now prohibited. Why is this document so valuable? Because there will absolutely be times when someone wants to do something that the DGO is staunchly against, and having a formal policy in place gives you something to reference rather than just “because I said so”. Putting this document together is fairly easy, below are some tips to get you started.
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An important piece of Data Governance is enforcing the policy and governance over data that the council has put in place. This can be one of the most challenging pieces of data governance, and it really occurs at the point where a data governance program and data quality program intersect. The position you don’t want to find yourself in is only being able to find data violations after they occur, through some kind of profiling tool.  While this is certainly a reactive piece you need, you also need to have proactive data governance practices that will find data changes and missuse before it occurs.

Think you’d have to be Nostradamus to do that? Keep reading for 3 ways to be proactive in enfocing data governance policies.
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Tailoring your message is an essential project management tool that for some comes natural, but can prove to be a difficult task for others. We’ve all been in ‘business meetings’ that have been hijacked by an IT person who goes way too in depth on programming logic, database design, and architecture plans. On the flip side, I’m sure many of us have also been in ‘IT meetings’ where a business stake holder goes way to in depth on financial trending, changes in legislation, and marketing initiatives.
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One thing that I’ve always advised people to do when starting an enterprise wide program is to get into the corporate newsletter, magazine, weekly update, or whatever communication device your organization uses.

It is generally pretty easy to get in as the communications department is always looking for good content to fill out their publication. What I do is just check who the newsletter is coming from and shoot an email over to them letting them know you are trying to spread the word about your new Data Governance Program that is going to “greatly improve the quality and value of the data at [insert your company name here].” They are usually more than happy to include your program in the next communication. Read on for how to frame your story for best impact…
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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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