The goal of data governance is to manage data effectively in an organization, ensuring its availability, usability, integrity, and security. Data is a key asset that is vital for modern businesses in decision-making and running operations. Data governance is crucial for organizations as it ensures that data is managed, controlled, and protected adequately. It helps establish a framework for data-related policies, procedures, and standards. Data governance promotes collaboration and transparency across different departments and stakeholders. It also supports data integration, master data management, and data lifecycle management. Data governance is essential for maximizing the value and minimizing the risks associated with organizational data.
With effective data governance, organizations can ensure data accuracy, quality, and consistency. Data governance helps guarantee that the data used by an organization is accurate, complete, and up-to-date by ensuring data quality. The importance lies in avoiding poor quality data to prevent serious consequences such as financial losses or reputational damage caused by incorrect business decisions.
Data governance helps protect sensitive data, such as personal information or confidential business information. It is extremely important to protect sensitive data to avoid serious consequences, like data breaches and penalties. Data governance improves data security by implementing measures like access controls and encryption. This is important because data security breaches can lead to financial losses or reputational damage.
Data governance ensures organizations meet compliance requirements for privacy and financial reporting. Failing to comply with these regulations can cause significant penalties or legal action. It also enables compliance with regulations and privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA.
Data governance helps organizations manage and use data for business operations. This includes ensuring that data is accessible to those who need it, as well as being able to track and audit data usage. Data governance facilitates better decision-making by providing reliable and trustworthy data.
Data governance is a crucial component of any modern business. It is vital to ensure data quality, security, and compliance for effective business decisions and operations.
To convince senior leadership that data governance is important, you need to:
Make the business case. Show how data governance can help the company achieve its strategic goals. Explain how proper data governance can increase efficiency, reduce costs from duplicate or poor quality data, and enable better decision making. Provide concrete examples and data to show the potential financial impact. For example, data governance can help to improve the quality of decision-making, reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve customer service.
Quantify the benefits. If possible, put a dollar value on the benefits of data governance. This will help senior leadership to see the return on investment. For preparation, I interviewed the business leaders to assess the value, maturity and cost of the data. This information helped me to quantify the benefits specific to our organization.
Emphasize regulatory compliance. Proper data governance helps ensure compliance with regulations around data privacy, financial reporting, etc. This can reduce risk of penalties and reputational damage.
Highlight the risks. Explain what can happen if data governance is not implemented. For example, data breaches, regulatory compliance violations, and poor decision-making can all be costly for businesses. I quantified using numbers published by well known studies done by Delloitte, KPMG and Gartner.
Note competitive advantage. Good data governance gives a competitive edge as other companies struggle with scattered, duplicated, or inaccurate data. Highlight how competitors are investing in data governance. In my case, surprisingly, this was easier to get.
Get allies in IT. The CIO/CTO is often already sold on data governance. Get their team to reinforce the benefits and advocate for it. I influenced the influencers. This helps to get them involved directly or indirectly. I used quotes from people that the sr. leadership trusts to illustrate points.
Relate governance to strategic goals. Show how it concretely supports corporate initiatives around analytics, digital transformation, customer experience etc. Every strategic business goals that I've been involved in, has either a technology-oriented goal or data-specific goal. Provide examples of why those goals cannot be accomplished without data governance.
Use real examples. Point to instances where bad data caused major problems for the company. This grabs attention. For instance, I estimated the cost of data management department and estimated wastage due to lack of data quality and lack of data standardization. These numbers were very convincing to the audience.
Focus on business ownership. Stress this is not an IT project but a company-wide initiative that requires business leaders to sponsor and participate. If you launch a data governance program under IT ownership, the chances of it succeeding are rather limited. If enterprise-wide data governance is not feasible, you will get value in the siloed implementation. However, it is still important for the business to own it, prioritize, and sponsor it.
Get buy-in from other stakeholders. Before you approach senior leadership, make sure that you have the support of other key stakeholders, such as department heads and business unit leaders. This will show senior leadership that data governance is a priority across the organization.
Here are some specific examples of how you can make the business case for data governance:
Improved decision-making: Data governance can help to ensure that decision-makers have access to accurate, timely, and relevant data. This can lead to better decisions and improved outcomes.
Reduced costs: Data governance can help to reduce costs by eliminating duplicate data, improving data quality, and reducing the risk of errors.
Increased revenue: Data governance can help to increase revenue by enabling businesses to better understand their customers, develop new products and services, and improve their marketing and sales campaigns.
Improved customer service: Data governance can help businesses to improve customer service by providing them with a better understanding of their customers' needs and by enabling them to resolve customer issues more quickly and efficiently.
You can also highlight the risks of not having data governance in place. For example, data breaches can be costly and damaging to a company's reputation. Regulatory compliance violations can also lead to fines and other penalties. Poor decision-making can lead to lost profits and other negative consequences.
Once you have made the business case for data governance, you need to get buy-in from senior leadership. The best way to do this is to develop a comprehensive data governance plan that outlines the goals, objectives, and benefits of data governance. You should also identify the resources that are needed to implement and maintain the data governance program. The key is relating data governance to tangible business risk, costs, and strategic priorities. With persistence and allies, you can get leadership on board. Start with a targeted pilot program first to demonstrate quick wins.
Example of a value proposition for data governance:
Business Canvas Model | |
|---|---|
Key Partners | - IT Department - Legal and Compliance Teams - Data Analytics Teams - External Consultants |
Key Resources | - Data Governance Tools - Data Stewards - Training and Education - Data Policies and Procedures |
Key Activities | - Data Auditing - Policy Development - Data Classification - Incident Response |
Value Proposition | - Data Security - Compliance - Data Quality - Business Insights |
Channels | - Internal Training - Internal Communication - Digital Platforms - Meetings and Workshops |
Customer Segments | - Employees - Customers - Regulators and Auditors |
Cost Structure | - Technology Costs - Personnel Costs - Training Costs - Legal Costs |
I've shared guidelines and tips to consider based on my recent data governance adventure at my company. I interviewed over 50 business leaders to accumulate the answers to key structured questions. My questions were about what each business area considers as valuable data asset, key challenges they're facing and solutions that have worked or not worked to address the issue. I had to repeat the 'convince cycle' at each level to onboard the data governance committees and members. It took me 6 months to establish the executive steering committee followed by a recurring cadence to discuss priorities and getting them to evangelize data governance. Within 12 months, I had substantial quick-wins established that demonstrated value to the business. This led to continued support and engagement across the organization.
Sash Barige
Jun/20/2021
Photo Credit: DGI.org
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