Attacking data governance

Attacking data governance

I was delighted to receive this question as it sees the potential in Data Governance as an offensive approach and not just the usual defensive activity.

Recall that we are always trying to do one or more of the following for our organisations:

1. Increase revenues

2. Decrease costs

3. Manage risk

Most data governance teams focus on the second and third of those activities. Delivered effectively, you can’t go wrong. The firm will be in a more comfortable place and the your role will likely be safe for a considerable time.

But the first one, increasing revenues, is what generates excitement and enthusiasm.

Reading the question carefully, it starts by asking about Data Governance, but concludes that it’s Data Quality which could help his sales team.

Let’s unpack this.

Businesses succeed or fail on the basis of the decisions that they take.

Sometimes there can be other factors which cause a seemingly bad decision to turn out amazingly well; and otherwise a sensible decision can have a terrible outcome.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but not when it interferes with assessing the quality of the decision which you made.

The question I ask myself is

Indeed, some people keep a journal of their decisions and track the outcomes, so they can look back and consider whether there are any themes or commonalities in their decision making which have a positive or negative impact.

As a data professional, I want my organisation to have data which is good enough for them to make good decisions.

Data Quality plays a major part in this, but don’t just think about accuracy.

• Is the data timely? Does it cover a suitable timeframe and is it sufficiently recent? If you are selling ice cream, you will find sales figures for the equivalent time period in previous years to be more useful than that for previous months.
  

• Is the data available? Can I access the data and can I get permission to do so? Some firms make data available by default; others restrict it on a need-to-know basis, and this could be due to legal and regulatory concerns, or people being unhelpful.
  

• Is the data sufficiently granular? If my ice cream business had sales of £10,000 last month, but I don’t know if that came from selling ice cream, or coffee, or because one person left a super-generous tip, then I can’t make good decisions.
  

• Do we know what the data means? Does my profit number refer to profit before or after tax? What about if I had a one-off exceptional cost to buy or fix a piece of equipment?
  

Once again we are back to our fundamental components of Data Governance:

• Data Definitions - what we are talking about

• Data Community - who you can talk to about it

• Data Lineage - where it comes from

• Data Issue Management - how to fix it

Let’s repeat what we said above - the question starts by asking about Data Governance, but concludes that it’s Data Quality which could help his sales team.

and here’s something incredibly important to know…

We should not be using our relationship with the business to teach them about the difference between data governance, data quality or even data management!

Instead, we use our skills and techniques in data governance to the business what they want.

Which is probably not data quality either.

It’s actually revenue generation.

(Scroll back up to the question if you don’t believe me).

Revenue generation which is driven by “better data” (whatever that means) and we know that we can deliver that “better data” because we’re awesome at data governance.

Here’s the bit that might be scary for some of you.

To understand what the business needs, you’re going to have to talk to them.

I don’t even think that a survey or questionnaire is sufficient.

You need to interact with them, so you can understand the what, the why and the how of their business activity.

What decisions they make and why they make them.

What data drives those decisions.

How better data can improve those decisions.

Once done, you can update your Data Issue Log with the issues, constraints and impacts. Better still, you can include the potential benefits which would accrue from resolving these issues.

And this is how Data Governance can be used for offence and not just defence.

Have a wonderful week,
Charles