Data Governance » Upper Management

Speak their language – Tailor your message!

Brian — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:15:29 +0000

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.

While these people meant well, what they missed out on was the fact that you must tailor your message to your audience. This is particularly important for Data Governance, because you will be bridging the gap between the business and IT, not widening it. For your key messages, such as the value proposition and scope of the program, you must be able to explain it clearly to both IT and Business in terms that they not only understand (because they’ll likely understand it any way you say it), but also tailor it to their wants, needs, and activities that they deal with on a daily basis. This helps gets buy-in and establishes you as someone on ‘their side’.

Here is a little exercise:
1. Write down an elevator speech for all of your key messages. If you don’t have any, you can find tips on the Data Governance Elevator Speeches here. If you are stuck on what your key messages are, just start by providing a short answer for each of these questions: “What is Data Governance?” “What is your scope?” “What is the benefit of Data Governance?”

2. Now, put your answers in the left side of a chart with 5 columns. Each answer should be in its own row.

3. Across the top of the last four columns, title them “IT Worker”, “IT Exec”, “Biz Worker”, “Biz Exec”.

4. You probably know what to do now. Rewrite your elevator speech in the columns to the right of them, but this time tailor the message to the specific audience that the column pertains to.

AD: Data management disciplines can be applied to include the digital image of paper based information. This unified approach between managing digital and paper based assets can improve access control, provide an improved audit trail, and reduce the operational costs traditionally associated with managing paper archives.

5. Once you have done that for all of your messages swoop back to your first column and title it “Mixed Audience”. Go back down that column, and rewrite your original elevator speeches so that they are targeted towards a mixed audience of IT and Business workers and Execs.

6. Use these!

I hope that helps!

8 Reasons Why Data Governance Fails

Brian — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:17:50 +0000

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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.

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.

Bonus
Data management needs to extend to incorporate the digitisation of paper based management systems. Document imaging provides a realistic alternative to a paper archive environment. Providing secure controlled access and audit trails.

Be Visible, Champion the Data Governance Cause

Brian — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:23:08 +0000

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.

Its important to know your audience when speaking or presenting and you need to specifically tailor your message to what they want to hear. Executives want to know the value you bring to the organization – Remember “Make Money, Reduce Cost, or Mitigate Risk. Period” ?? Make sure your presentation for your executives centers around at least one of those important issues.

For your business units, they are going to want to know what you can do for them. Are you going to help them do their jobs better? Make things more efficient? Fix a problem that is causing them particular pain? Set yourself a goal of getting in front of at least 2 new business teams each month – even if this goes against your corporate culture. Make it casual, don’t be stuffy… just explain what Data Governance is all about and how it could help them and then listen to what they have say. You may learn a lot if you listen closely.

Finally, if you are meeting with an IT team, you’ll want to come from a technical perspective but don’t gloss over the business value. I’ve found that even though you are in a room full of IT people, they want to know what value the program has for the company and are always interested in what the business is discussing in the meetings. So, you might start out by talking about Data Governance and what the goals are, talk about the technical tools being used, review the data fields that are of particular interest right now and the systems that are being reviewed, then close with the ‘recent happenings’ from the Data Governance Stewardship council.

It is absolutely imperative that you work on your soft skills to ensure you Data Governance program’s success.

If you have to, send out a survey to the rest of the company, specifically the ones you are doing the work for, to see what your customer ratings are. The feedback on how they rate you, and what you can do to improve, will help you even more in championing your cause.

Want SOA? Got Data Governance?

Brian — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:48:26 +0000

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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.

The Data Governance aspect for SOA is that all systems are using the same calculations for enterprise fields, all terminology is the same across fields (this gets messy with mergers and acquisitions), that the metadata is matching for like fields (length, type), etc. If you don’t have all of these governance aspects already in place for the data, it will make implementing SOA at your organization that much harder.

Analyzing Feedback
Another aspect to data governance that is often overlooked is reviewing customer feedback. How often is the company getting requests for name changes, address changes, typos fixed, errors corrected, etc? The company may be losing thousands of dollars or more a month changing data that, if managed correctly, would not have been wrong in the first place. A solution worth looking into are the many different enterprise feedback management systems available by a plethora of vendors.

The Proverbial Elevator Speech

Brian — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 11:22:46 +0000

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:

a high-level explanation of what Data Governance is
the current up-to-the-minute status of the program
a convincing speech that highlights a particular need you might have, etc.

Having these down on paper reinforces them in your mind, so that you are ready at a moments notice.

This has saved my butt on more than one occasion. I hope this little tid-bit helps you, too!

Getting Executive Buy-in (and keeping it)

Brian — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:28:33 +0000

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

Get a quick win
Fix a Pain point
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)

Explain that it is a new industry expectation that is here to stay
Show the sheer amount of data and systems out there, and explain that no one group is ensuring the accuracy (even of the most important data)

Keeping Executive Buy-in

Stay visible via a newsletter and/or updates
Have good metrics that demonstrate the value of Data Governance (work with the stewardship council to identify metrics)
Have your elevator speeches prepared
Speak at as many of the update and all-hands meetings as you can

Post any ideas that you may have in the comments below!