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Your data governance board members often share common pain points - help them connect those challenges

Well, the Enterprise Data World conference has been quite good. Data governance has been a popular topic, with lots of talk about making data governance more effective.  One presentation talked about “Lean Data Governance” and another that talked about “Non-Intrusive Data Governance.” There were some similarities, and I came away with a few new ideas and lots of interesting conversations along the way.

Let’s pick up from where I left off. I introduced agile data governance and my experience: that it accomplishes the same thing as the “typical” approach (can I call it the “boil the ocean” approach? Would that be mean?), but uses a very different mindset.

Let me start this by discussing how you select a data governance board, and how you establish governance priorities.

Remember, agile data governance is all about focus and scope management.

The first steps of board recruitment and prioritization are great examples of an effective approach to getting DG started.  For example, I’ve found that if you were to interview the top executives across your organization and ask them a few questions, you would find lots of similarity in the answers. These questions include:

• What are the things that are keeping you from reaching you organizational and corporate goals?
• Which kinds of operations or processes are most “broken” today?
• Which “broken” operations or processes cause the most risk, issues, rework, loss, etc?
• Which opportunities are you missing today because you don’t have trusted data when and where you need it?

In fact, you’d come up with very consistent list of less than 10-12 problem areas that were shared across the organization.

Yes, each unique business unit or cross-functional business area will have their own issues that are unique to what they do. But in general, most senior executives will come up with a very similar let of problems, issues, risks and missed opportunities.

And if you were to get them in a room together after this inquiry, they could pretty easily stack-rank the most costly issues, or those that are holding the organization back. They could fairly easily agree on the top three issues, and then the most critical data issue facing them.

It does not take six weeks of JAD sessions or off-sites or focus groups to come up with those answers. Most leaders know the issues that keep them up at night.

And guess what? It doesn’t require any discussions of data models, intelligent keys, metadata, SOA, MDM, BI, clouds, flavors of data stewards or any other of our favorite topics. In fact, most business leaders are quite relieved not having to discuss these subjects! (What is UP with them, anyway?)

So, how many people does it take to prioritize this list of issues, pains and opportunities?

Well, this is about selecting a small group (4 or 5) of the most objective, knowledgeable, balanced influencers in the organization. This group is usually self-selecting and self-policing, starting with the executive who can recruit the most objective influencers in the enterprise.

Usually, these folks know who represents which bodies of knowledge and perspectives so that, together, they can rationally agree on those issues that matter most to the success of the organization.

In my experience, the CIOs, CTOs and CFOs are the most invested in solving pervasive, shared business problems and are the least parochial in their views of data as an asset. They usually are the best people to start with in starting a data governance initiative.

At this point, if you’ve followed this approach, you have a small group of fairly objective, rational leaders who have stack-ranked a list of issues caused by poor quality data.

You should also have general agreement among a group of business leaders which are the “biggest bang for the buck” issues to address first.

And it takes only a few meetings to get to this point and perhaps six weeks of elapsed time.

So what comes next? I’ll tackle that in my next blog.