For many people in business, the mention of Data Governance evokes excessive red tape, bureaucratic drag, and, most of all, outsiders meddling in daily operations. “What is the preconceived notion about Data Governance? We are the police, we tell you no, we tell you to stop, we slow you down,” said Sherry Hidalgo, senior enterprise governance and data manager at Shaw Industries, during her presentation at DATAVERSITY’s recent Data Governance & Information Quality Conference in San Diego.
Hidalgo’s compelling account of her Data Governance journey at Shaw Industries not only overturned such stereotypes of data governors as oppressive intruders but also served as a remarkable case study of how Data Governance can be a force of efficiency and streamlining. Her story illustrates how a well-led Data Governance program can save a company untold hours and dollars – and how this can be implemented with amazing speed.
Before arriving at Shaw Industries, Hidalgo spent over 20 years implementing software solutions for various large-scale institutions (prisons, universities, and hospitals). However, overhauling Shaw was her most ambitious project to date, as the corporation is a $6 billion empire that supplies much of the world’s flooring and surfacing products. Despite this, the company suffered from outdated, clunky data management: Its team members were often unaware of what the other hands were doing – or even how many other hands existed.
Yet, within three months, Hidalgo transformed operations and corporate culture by building a successful Data Governance program.
When Hidalgo joined Shaw Industries in 2019, the corporate giant was at a crossroads. While the company had a healthy staff of data stewards, Shaw Industries lacked any coherent Data Governance framework. Its data managers were firmly married to pre-electronic ways of doing things. “As you can imagine, siloed data sets. No enterprise solution. Just little pockets of governance,” Hidalgo recounted. “We had to shape and change that mindset from ‘We do it this way’ to ‘We do it the Shaw way now.’ Everyone on the same page.”
While Hidalgo’s makeover of Shaw Industries ultimately leaned heavily on a stem-to-stern tech retrofit, the most important piece in the process was having the right people. Shaw’s chief information officer (CIO) of almost four decades had just retired. When it came time to hire a new head, Hidalgo steered Shaw towards taking on an outside leader with fresh eyes, a wealth of experience, and most crucially, an almost fanatical belief in data-driven, top-down solutions.
After it took a jaw-dropping three weeks for staff to furnish a simple list of Shaw’s clientele, the new CIO immediately changed the direction of his new concern, pushing Shaw’s transformation of over 30 disconnected data-capturing systems into a unified master data solution.
As Hidalgo affirms, having unwavering executive support of Data Governance from a CIO with a passion for data can make all the difference in the world. “That support really meant a lot to us,” she said. “You’re getting ready to go into an implementation that is hairy. It’s a lot. It’s pulling information from people; it’s talking to people who don’t want to do it. So, if you don’t engage your leadership, they’re not going to do it either.”
With a new data-friendly CIO at the helm, Hidalgo was able to assemble the right team for the job and, at the same time, create an environment of maximum engagement with data culture. She assembled discussion teams and even a data book club that read and reviewed the latest Data Governance literature.
