Data Governance: Embrace the Boring Stuff

Data Governance – you have heard the term a million times and not once has it driven excitement in to your heart. I’d like to spend the next few minutes changing that.

Data Governance is formally defined as “… a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.”

Boring.

How about if I told you that Data Governance is about enabling individuals to do their job – not spend 50% of their time wrangling data in excel, fighting against legacy systems or badly configured system applications – completing the work they are employed to do? Revolutionary!

Marketing Analyst? You should be able to pull down all the information you could ever need to evaluate the Spring campaign, and using the reliable, available data on the analytics platform you are trained and enabled to use, innovate the Spring campaign to improve performance next year.  

Operations Manager? You should know your performance to the minute, all readily available in reports and dashboard’s regularly referenced to drive improvement. You should trust the insights available to you, and work with technical teams to improve predictive capabilities – need to optimise contact centre performance? AI teams should be able to use machine learning to improve shift patterns, skill set availability and combine with accurate call forecasting.

But Data Governance is all about rules and policy making – surely that adds more red tape to data accessibility? No, not when done correctly.

Data Governance is about ensuring that data is:

• Available

• Accurate

• Accessible

This empowers People to be:

• Data Driven

• Responsible

• Involved

Using Technology to:

• Automate

• Innovate

• Improve

How do we set up Data Governance?

The honest answer is that you start now, and realistically start small.

A data steering group is the first step. This is made all the easier if you have strong sponsorship from a leader within the business. And don’t create a steering group of only technical people – include Operations representatives. Data strategy within any business has to support all colleagues across the business; include them, support them and bring them on the journey with you.

Identify data guardians, or assign data guardians if they haven’t organically become visible. Ownership and guardianship of data is fundamental to Data Governance. Data Quality and trust in data will only come if issues or misunderstandings can be cleaned up. Data Guardianship is the lynchpin here. It’s the foundation of all of the useful collateral that will improve data driven culture in the organisation:

• KPI Glossary

• Data Dictionary

• Data Lineage

Consider user enablement as soon as possible. Are employees data literate? Do they have access to learning whether it’s on demand, classroom training or data champions within the business? Are analysts or developers able to come together in a shared forum to discuss pain points, successes, new updates to the analytics tool?

With each initiative, you have the opportunity to improve how people within the organisation do their job and who they do it with. Technical teams should be spending time gathering requirements and feedback from the business, rolling out new solutions. And equally, the business should be able to have a forum to feedback on changing needs, or developing changes to the way of working.

Collaboration and cooperation are the only ways to develop a strong, data driven culture. These two concepts require data, policy, and technology but they don’t exist without People. Finance have to trust that their data isn’t misinterpreted or misused. That becomes a lot simpler when Finance know there are security policies in place to ensure authorised use of data for insight, and that their KPI’s are defined and referenceable to remove misunderstanding.

Data Governance helps us to demolish the silos that hold businesses back from utilising data as innovatively as possible.

Contact Advancing Analytics today to discuss our Data Governance QuickStart.