Entries Tagged 'Good Tip' ↓

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I had a topic in the hopper that I wanted to talk about soon, something along the lines of…”Want SOA at your organization? You better have Data Governance. Well, Neil Hepburn beat me to the punch, sorta, with his article titled SOA without IT Governance = Goodluck, which I might add is a great title.

Neil has a compelling discussion that boils down to the fact that to implement a SOA strategy, without managed data and metadata is, “like boarding a ship with an incompetent navigator. Will you get to your destination? Sure, but it’ll take you a lot longer, and cost you a lot more.”

Ed Tittel has a great article about SOA and Data Governance. While Data Governance and IT Governance are distinctly different, they are both essential to successful SOA. SOA involves the highest level of reusability for any services performed in an organization. In order for this to be truly reusable, you absolutely must have your data governed…. because yes, the services are systems talking to one another, that is the infrastructure. But what is being passed between the services? Data. Continue reading →

Recurring meetings are a must. If you are a new program, once a week, no questions asked. If you’ve got the ball rolling, everyone is participating and knows their role, every other week works nicely. But no matter what, make sure there is an understanding among your team that they must attend these meetings.

Make it easy on yourself by holding the meeting at the same time of day in the same location. You could have it every Thursday from 10-11AM, or every other Wednesday at 9:30… whatever works best for you. The key here is that you need to make sure people are attending regularly. A really good tip is to… Continue reading →

There will come a time when you’ll step into the elevator with a VP, CIO, CEO, or some other executive and they’ll inevitable say, “So how is everything going?” While you can always tell them about your son’s tee-ball practice or daughter’s ballet recital, wouldn’t it be better if you immediately could say, “We’re working on the principle loan amount with the Data Governance Council to ensure that it is being calculated consistently across all systems. When we’re done, we can be absolutely sure this field is correct”.

Its extremely important that you have a couple of good ten second elevator speeches ready for cases just like this. You’ll want Data Governance elevator speeches such as: Continue reading →

If there is one thing that will make you stand out among all the other corporate iniatives in your organization, its branding. Its the same reason most people think of McDonalds for hamburgers, and not Applebees. McDonalds worked hard to be the first company you think of when you think hamburgers.

Likewise, you want to be one of the first programs that comes to mind when people think Data, Quality, Compliance, Data Changes, etc. To do this, you’ll need to implement some very easy techniques that businesses do all the time. Call if marketing if you will, but just internally.

A Logo
Get a logo that represents what you’ve defined Data Governance at your organization to be. It could be as simple as a clip art from Microsoft Office, or you could fire up PhotoShop and create something from scratch. Either way, get a logo for your program.

Once you’ve done that, stick it on the top left corner of everything! Put it on your PowerPoint slide template, on all of your requirements documents, memos, etc.

A Tag Line
Its also important to have a tagline so that people know immediately what your program is all about. It also helps if it ties into the logo that you’ve choose.

Here are some examples of logos and taglines to get you thinking (or you could just use these as is, I don’t mind)… Continue reading →

There are many ways in which you can introduce Data Governance into your organization. It may be easier in smaller organizations, tougher in larger organizations, complicated in global businesses, etc… But, no matter how you go about introducing it, remember this critical point for all your positioning, meetings, and messages: In order to succeed in getting data governance funded, started, or in keeping it alive you must either Make Money, Reduce Cost, or Mitigate Risk.

Making money can come in a number of ways. It can be from a sales perspective, where better data ensures your sales force is targeting the right customers or leads. From marketing, a good formula to look for may be, if we improve the quality of X, we can expect the response rate to improve by Y, which results in an increased income of Z.
Continue reading →

Want your Data Governance program to be a huge success at your organization? Want to be hailed as an excellent project manager, worthy of an honorary PMP (if you don’t already have one)?

Well then, you need to get off on the right foot. You can do this by 1. finding a pain point, and 2. fixing it. Sound easy? It is! Don’t make it complicated.

People tend to over-think this a bit, and I just want to encourage you to be the go-getter early on for Data Governance. Continue reading →

Your program kick-off meeting will set the tone for the next 6-12 months, so you want it to be just right. As such, be very planned and methodical in what you do and don’t decide to talk about.

Do start by talking about Data Governance from a high level. Get everyone ‘level-set’… remember, your stewards and other attendees haven’t been eating, breathing, and dreaming DG for the last few months/years. Give everyone a good foundation in what Data Governance is.
Continue reading →

This can be a tough one, and there is no one guaranteed way to succeed at this, but there are a number of techniques you can use that will help.

Getting Executive Buy-in

1. Get a quick win
2. Fix a Pain point
3. Demonstrate the value using metrics (ie. if this field were 88% accurate instead of 87% accurate, when used in a marketing campaign we could expect a return $315,000 more in sales)

Continue reading →

Yesterday I posted about building the stewardship council and breezed through the bit about selecting the lead steward. I want to give some more information about what was successful for me…

I didn’t look for a chief steward until we had executive support. I think it is very important that you ensure your formal program has executive support, otherwise it probably isn’t going to go very far. So, once you have executive support, you can start to think about your program structure. Most programs have a chief data steward, namely they act as the head of the data stewardship council.

Landing an effective chief steward can be a bit daunting, they must be a leader, be recognized by upper management, be respected by their peers, and be visible to the workforce. Some organizations choose to put the stewardship council together first, and then have them elect a chief steward. My philosophy is to do the opposite, because a good chief steward can put a good council together. Continue reading →

The best approach I’ve found for building a stewardship council is to start by identifying the lead steward. This can be done in a number of different ways, and I’ll write about it later, but the easiest way is by having the business sponsor pick them (with some consultation from you). Having the business sponsor pick the chief steward ensures that the chief steward will work hard and allocate the time needed. It also means that the steward has exposure to upper management and should have some clout within the company.

The key part of this is the ‘clout’, or recognition this chief steward has inside the company. You’ll need that chief steward to leverage that visibility to build the stewardship council. Continue reading →