The second key to success is to set expectations from the beginning. Do you expect that they close the issue out by a certain date? Or, do you just want them to research it and have results and recommendations within the month? Whatever it is, make sure they know up front. One thing is for certain, if you don’t let them know of your expectations in the beginning, 80% of them will not meet them. You want to be on the other side of the 80/20 rule.


My final key to success is to identify a leader for the issue and to then have that leader identify their team. The leader is generally the closest person to the issue. Having them identify their team puts some responsibility and ownership squarely in their lap.

The first tool had us look intrinsically at why we do things. On the top of a piece of paper we wrote down the name of a project or program we are currently working on. On the left side of the paper we wrote down how a “program or project will help me” and listed all of the reasons. On the right side we wrote “how the project is an obstacle to me” and listed our honest reasons. This tool is the first step in creating another of Len’s resources called the Power Diagram. Filling it out about yourself clearly defines your motives, and the rest of the diagram has you doing the same thing but for everyone else involved in the project (fill out what you think their motives are as well as their obstacles). This bring back into focus the “me and my” thoughts that were first discussed because it quickly becomes apparent that everyone has their own personal motivations for doing (or resisting) a project.

The next item discussed was the vision for your program. Len thinks that most people create their project vision in such a way that it encompasses the business mission statement. In fact, the opposite should actually be done, and Len displayed a diagram where the business vision encompasses the project vision. He states that, “When we look at the larger picture, in reality, our job in data quality is to support the overall business – just like all the other aspects of the enterprise.”


The last part of the session had us focusing on goals and conflict resolution. In brief, we should always keep the overall goals insight. As for conflict resolution, the following is given for how to overcome it:

1. Don’t react. Stay objective.
2. Disarm. Step to their side.
3. Change the game. Don’t reject… Reframe (holistic, common goal)
4. Make it easy to say yes
5. Bring them to their senses, not their knees (using power, not force)

All in all, I’d highly recommend this session. The principle taught can be used across a wide variety of projects, programs, and organizations.

Len Silverston is a consultant and the President of Universal Data Models.

Here is some open source software that you can use for your program:

• Open WorkBench (used by over 100,000 PMs) – this is free project management software… but you’d never guess it was free
• Google Apps – This is Google’s counter to Microsoft Office. I love this because it makes sharing super easy, and you always have access to your documents, no matter what computer you are on.
• Twiki - This is a wiki designed for enterprise use. A wiki is an incredibly powerful way to share knowledge in your organization.
• Hopefully one day I can add a data quality and profiling tool here, as well as a good meta-data repository

I hope you’ve learned a little bit about the Open Source movement. I’m a big believer and supporter in this methodology. If you are new to it, give Firefox a try, I bet you won’t go back to Internet Explorer!

• Web 2.0 on Wikipedia
• Web 2.0 defined on O’Reilly

Web 2.0 sites that you’d recognize are:

• Flickr
• YouTube
• Wikipedia
• WordPress (blogging platform, which this blog uses)

The reason I’m posting on web 2.0 is because the value of its principles and technologies can really improve projects and programs at your organization. I’ve talked about how it would really be great to incorporate your metadata into a wiki so that it would be easier to keep up to date, and I also think the the portal and collaboration tools would help with keeping people involved (instead of just a once a week meeting).

In addition, I imagine you won’t be surprised to learn that I have a Data Governance blog on the intranet for our organization. This keeps council members up to date with the day-to-day activities of the Data Gov Office. The feedback from that has been great.


I encourage you to think over the next week or two how you can use your intranet and collaboration technologies, such as Sharepoint, to really turbo charge your Data Governance Program.

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?


I thought back about when I first started the Data Governance program at my company. We didn’t have a ton of support, a ton of staff, or any of the tools best suited for Data Governance… but, I found a way to use what we had to at least launch the campaign. Bonnie O’neil’s rule of “Use what you have lying around” certainly comes into play.

So, in this case, if the scope was already determined, I’d track everything in the best tool I had at the moment. If that means MS Excel or Access, that is what I’d use. You can always switch to something later if the funds become available, but you don’t want to just choose not to track, record, and document just because you don’t have the best tools out there.

If you show a high success rate very early on with almost no overhead, you will certainly get noticed and you’ll have experiences that many in the Data Governance area do not have because they’ve always had the fancy tools. You’ll have solid ‘in the weeds’ experience on how to build a Data Governance Program from the ground up.

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


I think it is important to know that there really can be a financial gain from a good Data Governance Program. Not only can it keep people out of handcuffs and increase regulatory compliance and security, but it can actually pay for itself and much, much more.

Take marketing data for example… Generally marketing departments don’t always use the best data. Sometimes it can be as simple as them using a not-so-good data source, but other times it can be just because they don’t have good, structured data. Imagine applying all of the Data Governance principles to marketing data. If done well, you could end up with a nice bullet on the executive status report saying, “The Data Governance Program improved the quality of the _____ data field, which increased the marketing response rate by __%. This increase in response rate resulted in an increase of $_,___,000 in sales revenue”.

Do you see why it is important that Wikipedia (a place where many people first get their feet wet with Data Governance) have this listed as a tenant for Data Governance? We aren’t just here to be overhead; we can be pivotal in meeting sales and marketing goals and helping increase revenue.

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.


4. No Metrics
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll never know when you get there”. You need to know where you are, where you have been, and where you are going. Keep metrics on your scope, your progress, your maturity model, your dollars saved, your dollars earned, your risk mitigated, and anything else you can. The more tangible, the better. You will use the metrics to keep people interested, both your stewards and management.

5. Poor Planning
You need to plan before you start Data Governance. Put together a communication plan, get an idea of your scope, talk with your effected business units… in other words, be prepared. Each organization is different, but get all the red tape out of the way so that you don’t bog your council down with that stuff. Make sure everything for the first few months of your program is planned out so you can focus on executing and adjusting (being reactive) since you’ve already put the pro-active work in up-front.

6. Loss of Momentum
You need to keep things going. Being successful once justifies a project, not a program. Projects end, a true Data Governance program doesn’t. You’ll need to continually track your successes (and failures) and keep searching out new ones, keep your council invested in Data Governance, stay active in Enterprise projects, etc. You can’t slow down after you succeed, you need to keep on plugging!


7. Loss of Funding
This can happen for the same reasons as the loss of executive support, but it can also happen if you aren’t financially justifying your existence. If you cost more than you are worth, you aren’t going to be worth keeping around. Make sure you are doing work that pays for you to exist.

8. Being Viewed as ‘Overhead’
You don’t want to be seen as “just another department”, you want to be seen as a necessity – an integral part of the organizations growth and stability. Frame your talking points around things such as Data Governance enables scalability of the organization, sustainable increased revenue, and tangible risk mitigation. Don’t be just another group… be visible, and try to be the rockstar group.

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…

Track attendance in an excel spreadsheet and have a tally at the bottom that shows you a count of how many attendees you’ve had. If you see that number start to decline, you’ll need to re-engage your audience. Check out this previous post about doing just that.

You want your intranet site to be updated often with news, minutes, updates, and other relevant and timely information. If you keep your site up-to-date, you can ensure that your audience will return often to stay in-the-loop.

You probably already know I’m a huge fan of the web 2.0 stuff – from wiki’s to blogs and portals, I love all that stuff and think it applies nicely to project management, and especially well for data governance. If you have Sharepoint then you already have many of the tools you need to make it easy to keep your site up to date. A blog is a great idea, and really easy to implement. You don’t need to be wordy or heavy-handed, just a few sentences fairly often to fill people in is perfect.

My intranet site consists of Data Governance:

• Blog
• Meeting Minutes
• Upcoming Meeting Schedules
• Projects in Progress
• Completed Projects
• Our Successes
• Lessons Learned
• Document Repository (link to folder on LAN)