All in the Data: CDOs Should Be Asking “How” … and Not “Why”
The secret lies with Data Governance. The Chief Data Officer (or whoever the Data Czar is at your organization) needs to get past, and I mean way past, the “Why is Data Governance important?” or “Why do we need Data Governance?” questions if they are ever going to be successful czar-ing the data. Rather, the CDO should be asking “How are we going to govern our data?”
Individuals at many organizations spend large amounts of energy trying to convince their leadership that money should be invested in the formal governance of data and information. Sometimes there are multiple people and/or groups that are all pushing in the same direction. Some of these groups are successful in convincing leadership that attention must be paid to improving the value that the organization gets from their most important asset. It’s all in the data.
One may ask, what does it take to get Senior Leadership to buy in to Data Governance and to buy in to the need to apply resources for better data management? The answer may be in their belief (or not) that data is an asset, and that the data will not manage itself. Just because your organization is successful now, that doesn’t mean that you cannot become even more successful by becoming further efficient and effective in your use of data and information.
The CDO should be asking “How are we going to govern our data?”
There are many reasons why organizations decide to put formal Data Governance in place. Some organizations are told by their auditors and examiners that they need to demonstrate formality around how people are held accountable for the data they define, produce, and use. These organizations are not really being given a choice to elevate the governance of data to a formal practice.
Other organizations decide to put formal data governance in place because they have invested (or are investing) heavily in resources intended to improve what they can do with their data. Many organizations invest to improve their ability to analyze their data only to find that the data that will feed these investments is not in very good shape. So, they decide that Data Governance is necessary to feed their “big data”, “data analytics” and “artificial intelligence” investments. These organizations decide that their technological investments require a solid foundation of well-governed data.
Other organizations put policies in place to assure that their data, information, records, and even metadata (data documentation) are “owned” and “stewarded” as valuable assets to leverage in order to be fully absorbed in the information age. These top down decisions to govern the data are typically only successful when a well thought-out and practical solution is approved and followed as a course of action.
That’s right … I said approved. Which again brings me back to gaining Senior Leadership buy-in for improved formality in how the organization governs their data.
Gaining Senior Leadership Buy-In
Gaining Senior Leadership buy-in requires that the person seeking buy-in has a well thought out plan for how the organization will maximize the value of the organization’s data through the implementation of formal Data Governance. An early step is to understand that there are several different approaches that an organization can take to implementing Data Governance. These approaches go by the following three descriptions:
The Command and Control Governance Approach is often thought of as a top-down “you will participate” approach. I call it command and control because this method of implementing Data Governance forces people to participate whether or not they understand the value that Data Governance will bring, and it is presented as a new add-on to people’s regular “day jobs”.
