Once you’ve got your data sensibly stored, formatted, de-duplicated and ready to support your business, you want to keep it that way, with a data governance programme.
Although that might seem obvious – after all, it’s a way of protecting your investment in data – I’ve often had to make a separate business case for governance.
I’ve been asked about how to do this many times. Here are the 6 key points to consider to make the case and secure buy-in.
Good data governance keeps you out of jeopardy
1. Data isn’t static. New data is constantly being generated; new feeds become available frequently; the questions that need to be asked of the data change all the time. Keeping the data quality high is a dynamic, ongoing process. Data governance provides the framework or guardrails for this. A strong data governance team makes sure that the root cause of any data issue is identified and systematically corrected at source.
2. Data governance is a yawn-inducing phrase to many people. Most execs are more focused on increasing profitability, or on using the latest AI capabilities to secure a sustainable competitive advantage. If I’m speaking with people who are new to data, I often introduce the subject by talking about ‘data enablement’. This conveys a strong sense of how the data team can help colleagues, rather than just being there to enforce the rules. Once they’ve realised the importance of lining all the data up in the right direction to help their organisation succeed, we can revert to discussing data governance.
3. If a company wants to increase its profits, first it needs to know what its profits are – and that depends on easy access to the latest, high quality data. Data governance is the means to deliver this.
4. Poor quality data is effectively a tax on many organisations. It costs real money, with decisions being made on the basis of wrong, missing, or outdated information. Fixing poor data quality means having to assign people to trawling through records, removing blank values and replacing them with default values; or scanning for people who’ve been recorded as 200 years old and fixing their date of birth. These employees could be using their time for less soul-destroying, higher-added-value activities – which means that data governance can save money through reducing staff churn, in addition to its primary purpose.
5. AI and machine learning (ML) can take a business to new heights, enabling new products and services, streamlining customer support, or highlighting anomalies to compliance teams for deeper analysis. But, as the old saying goes, rubbish in equals rubbish out. AI and ML start with data analytics, and if the data that’s been analysed isn’t good enough, it poisons the whole process.
6. Nobody wants a compliance investigation. Good data keeps you out of this jeopardy. It’s especially important in the regulated financial services sector.
Increasingly, organisations’ most important asset after their people is their data. Its value depends on it being well managed, enriched and monitored. Curating and assuring the provenance of the data is a key goal for a mature data function – in other words, data governance.
The right starting point is reviewing the organisation’s business strategy and identifying how data supports it. If either the business strategy or data strategy aren’t fully clear, The Data Practice can help. Using our Data Navigator and maturity assessments, we can enable you to build a data strategy that supports value outcomes. We can also help with parts of the process that are extra challenging, such as governance.
All too often people dive in and recruit a data governance team, only to find they’re sidelined by colleagues who are too busy supporting customers and generating revenue. If you start with a data strategy, alignment across the organisation is established up front.
This leads us on to how to find a data governance team who will make things happen. This is the second question I often get asked.
It’s something we can help with. We have a growing Data Governance team here at The Data Practice, and we can help you formulate a strategy, create a business case, deliver the solution and can help you find the right talent to take it forward. Let’s talk.
Krystalla de Snyder is data governance lead at The Data Practice. She has extensive experience covering all aspects of data governance as well as data management, data quality, data protection, ethical use of data and the tools and tech to support it all.
Photo credit: Milos Prelevic
