Congratulations!  By this step you have made the commitment to protect your most valuable data assets, identified key stakeholders, established regular discussions with these stakeholders, and identified the scope of your governance initiative.

Remember a key to success will be keeping this small, gathering senior level support, and celebrating frequent successes.

The governance model has several components; business elements, actions, metrics, agents.

In your stakeholder meetings you likely have discussed the scope of your initiative and through that discussion identified the key business elements that need governance.   These should be the business’s most important or most used data.  It is also likely to be the most confidential or most controversial.  And for all of these reasons each line of business, business department, or analytic team probably has their own data store and their own data definitions for these (therein lies the problem that you are working to solve).

Next, you and your stakeholder group will define the actions or operations that will be used to align these business elements across the disparate teams, data stores, or reports and get a common definition and common method of handling this data.  How will your group make decisions, process approvals, and reconcile differences?

It is critical at this step to be selective and pick the low hanging fruit and the items with the biggest bang for the buck.  Don’t try to define actions that cover all situations or you will find yourself endlessly meeting and discussing to account for every possible scenario.  I have seen many data governance initiative die at this point because teams cannot agree.

Next, we focus on metrics and the agents that will enforce the model you create.

A  Data Governance framework is comprised of the following parts;

• Oversight Board
• Stakeholder Forum
• Process Agents
• Business and Technical Liaisons
• A Repository
• Defined Focus Areas

Approaches that begin with spending money are doomed to failure, so start by building the portions that don’t require capital expenditures yet have real business impact.  The Stakeholder Forum is a perfect place to start for both of these reasons.

Stakeholders are the people, functional groups, and teams that depend on the data within the scope of your governance initiative.  To incubate this initiative, be sure to hand pick stakeholders that are already active in data.  Business analysts make excellent candidates because the quality of their reports and analytics are directly dependent on the data you are trying to govern.

Establish a roundtable with these stakeholders where you jointly identify the business needs and justification for a Data Governance function in your organization.  Next, define the role of Data Steward and leverage the Stewards to solve problems that arise with your data, such as conflicting data definitions.  Finally, establish some training, even if just simple documentation. 

Remember to start your Data Governance program by identifying the business’s most important or most used data.  Select a team of folks (such as business analysts) that use and depend upon this data and therefore have a vested interest.  Then leverage this team to create a Data Stakeholder forum and define needs, solutions, and training.

The topic of Data Governance can be abstract and difficult to define, furthermore, it often fails because of a lack of business focus.

Don’t let these challenges keep you from managing your extremely valuable data assets. Data Governance, done properly, establishes a foundation for defining, managing, changing, and integrating the Data in your organization. It enables the processes that will care for your Data and outlines the organizational decisions which impact Data’s meaning and value.

In this series of posts, we’ll outline the steps in building a framework to give concrete meaning to Data Governance in real business terms.

Your starting point is to create a Data Governance Framework which defines the essential scope and supporting processes. The goal is to align business needs with the governing functions, ensuring that the most important and most necessary pieces are established first. Move one step at a time and do not try to tackle the entire framework at once (it’s too daunting).

Before you can obtain the support of your executive management team, you first must identify critical business data needs and then pick the one most relevant to your business. If you are unsure where to start, try in sales or financials. Find the data elements are most controversial, most used, most confidential, or most regulated. Use these examples to build your business case and your sales pitch to gain executive leadership support for the concept.

Assuming you have support for the initiative, establish your Data Governance Organization. This is the authoritative body when it comes to Data decisions. Most importantly, it can be virtual and does not require additional staff (avoiding additional costs will be key to your success). This organization is responsible for the guidance, planning, and stewardship of your Governance initiative and we will define these responsibilities in more detail in the next post.

Let the framework serve as your roadmap to creating and launching a successful and business focused Data Governance program.