Data Governance Step by Step: Month 2 Week 3 & 4

Month 2 Week 3 & 4:

1. Identify key data assets and systems: Which data assets are most critical to your business? Which systems are used to collect, store, and manage these data assets?

2. Data Quality Assessment: Evaluate the quality of your data to identify issues like inaccuracies, duplication, and inconsistency. This will be impactful to get buy-in from the executive committee.

3. Identify Project Management Approach: Do you have a PMO (project management office)? Assess project management process used and specific project 'gates' that gates data activities. Identify gaps.

4. Categorize Business Needs and Key Challenges: Based on the surveys and assessments conducted during the previous month, build out use case priority and impact matrix.

5. Establish a data governance framework: This framework should define the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders, as well as the policies and procedures that will govern the use and management of data.

6. Define Data Governance Roles & Responsibilities

7. Define the scope and goals of your data governance program: What do you want to achieve with data governance? Do you want to improve data quality, enhance compliance, or optimize data utilization? Once you know your goals, you can tailor your implementation plan accordingly. What problems are you trying to solve, and what benefits do you expect to gain? Set clear objectives by defining the goals and objectives of your data governance program. Note, this is at a draft stage at this point. You'll need to review with the governance steering committee to finalize.

8. Data Governance Charter: Develop a draft data governance charter, stakeholder map and policy outline. Review it by the leadership influencers.

9. Data Catalog: Begin developing a data dictionary/catalog.

10. Identify members for Executive Steering Committee

​Establish a data governance framework This framework should define the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders, as well as the policies and procedures that will govern the use and management of data. Refer to data governance institute recommendations for the framework at DGI.org

• Read my blog post on 'How to create a Data Governance Framework'

​Define Data Governance Roles & Responsibilities

• A high-level data governance roles & responsibilities are required at this point in time.

• You should asking the senior leadership to enable Data Governance Council (DGC) with leaders from top business areas. Explaining their roles and responsibilities and the impact to their current daily job is important.

• The basic skeleton of the organization structure for the data governance that includes strategic, tactical and operational teams would ensure that the senior leadership would see the benefit of breaking the data silos and enabling a cross-functional oversight.

• Read my blog post on 'Data Governance: Establish Roles & Responsibilities'

• The blog post provides detailed role description, duties and its structure

​Define the scope and goals of your data governance program What do you want to achieve with data governance? Do you want to improve data quality, enhance compliance, or optimize data utilization? What problems are you trying to solve, and what benefits do you expect to gain?

• Note, this is at a draft stage at this point. You'll need to review with the governance steering committee to finalize.

• Read my blog post on 'Why Data Governance is Important'

• Read my blog post on 'Data Governance Program Metrics'. This post provides ways to measure the effectiveness of the data governance program and guides you on the goals that drive these metrics.

​Data Governance Charter Develop a draft data governance charter, stakeholder map and policy outline. Review it by the leadership influencers.

• Read my blog post on 'Data Governance: Establish the Charter'

​Data Catalog Begin developing a data dictionary/catalog. At this point, in the second month, you'll likely have a proof of concept data catalog to illustrate the value of centralizing and consolidating the catalog of 'everything' data that is broadly accessible across the organization. This is meant to get to a quick win and demonstrate the answers to frequent questions that the business would care about.

• Read my blog post on 'Establish a Data Catalog for Data Governance'

​Identify members for Executive Steering Committee

• Identify the c-level executives that typically work together and make business decisions

• You may want to consider including Sales, Marketing, Quality, Finance, Business Operations, Business Heads in your steering committee

• I work with one of the senior executive to get help with identifying and to get the meeting with the executives scheduled. I solicit feedback on what is typically expected during these presentations and prepare presentation materials to address them.

• I gather information on what concerns the senior executives are facing (listen to previous quarterly financial meetings, townhalls etc.) and opportunities they'd like address.

As you wrap up month 2 on your data governance journey, you would have arrived at an important milestone. You're ready to make the value proposition to your senior leadership and get their buy-in. With the structure and the approach I've shared, you should be confident to be prepared to win over the skeptics and get the business executives to be steering committee members in your data governance program as well as being the evangelists for the program. My next blog post will cover month 3 of the data governance journey.

Sash Barige

May/08/2022