Mastering Data Management

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An early win can help you gain traction with data governance and MDM.

In my last post, I talked about some sage advice I got from Lou Holtz, College Football Hall of Fame coach, and how his W.I.N, or “What’s Important Now?” philosophy applies to the practice of data governance.

I also exhorted you guys to keep focusing on “What’s Important Now?” I’ve certainly been trying to do that over the past couple of weeks. Let me tell you; it’s harder than it looks.

Where data governance is concerned, W.I.N. involves developing a business and political strategy that complements your technology strategy for data governance in your organization. That strategy would focus on the policy goals important to your business, and apply MDM technologies to meet those goals over time.

The strategy was based on three principles: 1) “Win Early”, 2) “Credibility Matters” and 3) “Walk, Don’t Run”. Today, I want to talk about the first principle, “Win Early”.

First, let’s be clear about one thing: “Win Early” is more than just a principle. It’s the real experience your team has when its activities are aligned with the priorities of your business, when you identify a critical data problem, and solve that problem quickly for the organization.

“Win Early” is what happens when MDM generates results, eliminating inefficiencies and redundancies, streamlining complex and error-prone business processes and saving the organization money… and doing so in a way that gets noticed by executive sponsors and stakeholders.

So, just who is “Winning Early”? I can think of at least three Initiate customers who clearly applied our MDM technologies in a manner that got them that early win.

Early Winner #1: Tim Fitzgerald, Sr. Director Business Technology & Strategy, CapitalOne, Initiate Systems customer since 2007.

“Our approach was to build out a proof of concept. We thought if we can prove that this thing works, we can move very quickly into production. From signing the contract… to going into live production, I think it was 132 days… And the large portion of that was actually standing up the hardware infrastructure.”  From our 2008 user conference, Initiate Exchange

Early Winner #2: Tony Ellis, Head of Information Communications & Technology, London Borough of Brent – Initiate Systems customer since 2007.

“In the UK, if a child goes missing, all authorities get an alert: ‘Can you try to find Johnny?’ Children and Families Services would check the usual back-office systems…and they couldn’t find the child. Then they went in [to Initiate] and they found the kid. We all sat there, realizing that whatever we invested was worth it, as they would not have found the kid if we did not have the hub. It turns out … the child was known to one of our housing systems that we generally would not have had access to without the hub…We’ve saved money, but this was one of our best early ‘wins’.”   From our 2008 user conference, Initiate Exchange

Early Winner #3: Sam Owens, Director of Systems Integration, Sentara Healthcare – Initiate Systems customer since 2006.

“[With Initiate deployed] we had a two- to three-year head start in actually changing our processes and removing a lot of our duplicates, which has set us up very well to go into that electronic medical record model.” Sam goes on to say, "Don't stop with the passive mode -- at least have a plan for going active. There's so much more value in stopping those [duplication] problems from happening than dealing with them after the fact."

Notice how each winner frames their win differently, according to the goals and priorities of the organization they’re serving. Whenever you find you can express the impact of what you’re doing in terms like these, you’re on track to “Win Early”.

In my next post, I’m going to focus on how W.I.N. Principle #2, “Credibility Matters”, applies to data governance. In the meantime, keep focusing on “What’s Important Now.”

This post is part of a series, Data Governance: "What's Important Now?"