Four Steps To Get Your Data Initiatives Rolling
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Get your data initiatives rolling in 2010 with these tips
I’ve read lots of great blogs on how to prepare for 2010 and achieve great results in your data quality, data governance, MDM and data warehouse initiatives. So here are some of my additions. Be sure to read Dylan Jones’ blog at dataqualityPRO on “8 Tips for Making Your Data Quality Resolutions Stick in 2010."
1. Focus on solving a meaningful problem – one that impacts the bottom line.
This means prioritizing and going after something that will deliver valuable results to the business/organization that you serve. If this fails to capture the interest of business leaders, it’s probably not going to see the light of day – so it has to matter to those who are running the ship.
2. Ruthlessly manage scope and rely on iterations!
Face it, many data quality issues are fairly complex, because high value data are usually highly shared, and end up in just about every system in your universe. So don’t try to tackle all instances of the data at once. That’s “boiling the ocean” and to be avoided as you’ll see in the next point.
Instead, when you’ve found meaningful problems to solve (point 1), choose one that can be carved up and solved in iterations of not more than a few quarters to complete, where possible.
It’s better to iterate, manage expectations, learn from your mistakes, limit impact of failure, and grow not only your solution but your fan base as you achieve results.
3. Leave things cleaner than when you found them.
In addition to refraining from falling into the well-worn behavior of “solving world hunger,” this also means refraining from “paving cow paths.” So, when you select a candidate meaningful problem to solve, please look for opportunities to un-do potential inefficiencies, redundancies and waste and replace with smarter solutions.
This may mean improvements in process definitions. It may mean improvements in data interchange mechanisms or eliminating complexities that serve no meaningful purpose. It may involve connecting the dots between systems that rely on some archaic mechanism for exchanging data.
4. Involve someone with some influence.
It’s great for us to sit around and commiserate on how, if we could only fix data problems, the world would be a better place, we’d have more time and money on our hands and our bosses would realize what heroes we actually are.
It’s great to get support inside and outside a company, and my own associations with organizations like DAMA, IAIDQ and others have helped me immensely over the years. But they pale in comparison to getting the active backing of someone who can make things happen in your organization!
A passionate leader who can open doors in functional, operational and technology areas is worth their weight in gold. As you focus on finding a meaningful problem, a tipping point would be if there is a business leader who has some “skin in the game” or will be passionately involved in your efforts.
If you can do these four simple things, you’ll find that you can rally the troops, synchronize the efforts of folks on different teams, effectively communicate, manage expectations and produce goodness that’ll leave people wanting more.
Do you have anything else you would add to this list?
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Marty
Great post. From my personal experience, I can't disagree with your view that having an influential backer in your organisation is essential to triggering a sustainable change.
However, I my experience has been that being an active member of the IAIDQ (I was the Director Publicity until last month and I lead their Irish Community of Practice) has actually helped me reach out more effectively to effective change leaders in various roles I've had. While the leaders had credibility in the business, being involved in a professional association and having access to insights from a large community of passionate and experienced people gave me more credibility with that change leader and helped me more effectively paint the value proposition for an Information Quality strategy to that change leader.
When I compared my ability and successes in influencing and driving effective changes to improve quality information with the outcomes achieved by people who may have had more overtly influential stakeholders but didn't actually have a clear understanding of what they were trying to achieve, I still think my $85 a year for IAIDQ membership is money well spent.