Run a successful Data Governance Program

You’ve made it to day 3 of “5 Days to a Data Maturity Model“. Day one was all about defining your scope and identifying the lowest maturity level you have. Day 2 covered finding a natural maturity model already occurring in your data. This is a good technique because it helps you build a maturity model that makes sense for your organization and the data you have, instead of trying to fit your data into pre-defined levels that may not make sense in the context of your data governance program. The next step is to define the highest maturity level, and we have a clever way of doing this that will keep your model consistent and easy to use. Continue reading →

Welcome to day 2 in my series “5 Days to a Data Maturity Model for Data Governance”. Yesterday we talked about identifying the scope of your Data Governance Program, and particularly what data you’ll be applying your maturity model to.

As your first task, I posed the question, “What is the lowest maturity level you currently have for your in-scope data?” (see Day 1’s post on the Data Maturity Model here) In this post we’ll talk about what to do with that, as well as review a term I call the ‘natural data maturity model progression’.
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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
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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
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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!