Let’s gear up your Data Intelligence program!

Never waste a good crisis

Yes, Covid-19 will cost your enterprise money. No, playing the victim card won’t help.

Imagine, you have launched your Data Governance program 5 years ago. Over those years a lot happened: your team designed and implemented a complete Data Governance strategy. You can proudly call yourself GDPR compliant, your knowledge workers (e.g. data scientists) have access to data they trust and data is managed on a daily basis. You might think of taking the foot off the accelerator, but why not gear up? Automated data quality checks, data monetization opportunities and/or making your data management more efficient. Think big!

Tunnel vision kills creativity

Ok, I’m not Ami Vitale, not even a photojournalist or filmmaker, but I know a thing or two about tunnel vision. I have been closely involved in designing and implementing data governance roadmaps for years now. Most of that time it has been in a Banking context. But there is way more potential in data governance than just ‘being compliant’. Creating a culture of transparency, ownership, stewardship might sound like ‘buzzwords’, but you need this if you want to make sure that data is owned, correct and up-to-date. It will help you check the box, but it won’t generate value let alone change your enterprise’s approach on how to handle data.

Don’t listen with the intent to reply, listen for what’s behind the words

Some departments are more severely affected by Covid-19 than others. Imagine that your marketing team had to cancel all their events, why wouldn’t you contact them? Maybe they can help you to finally build your own internal Data Governance brand! Not applicable in your situation? How about organizing your own virtual data community event? Also not applicable? Are you sure… Think twice, because new refreshing insights are always welcome! Don’t underestimate the importance of change management, data stewardship and an active user community.

Ok, so your marketing department is overwhelmed by questions of other departments, how about your Human Resources department? Could they support you by setting up a training platform, learning paths or further improve the capabilities of your team?

No? And your IT department, Finance or Legal? Let’s use these challenging times to go and speak with all your departments. Listen to their needs, their challenges. Take your time and come with a proposal for the different teams. For example introduce report certification so that Finance finally trusts the data they receive, embed Data Governance in IT so that they don’t have to invest days and days in answering questions that could be tackled by Data Lineage or a Data Dictionary. Let’s solve data quality issues in the external parties database of legal.

To collaborative team members, completing one another is more important than competing with one another

Ok, let’s conclude since four quotes in one short article are three too many…

• Use these difficult times to reinvent your Data Governance, Intelligence or Management department.
• People now realise, after working months from home, that things can change.
• Grab this momentum, listen to your colleagues, create a multidisciplinary team and update your Data Governance roadmap!

It is about time that you gear up your program and show that you can save (more) costs, generate (more) revenue… but start by listening to each team so that you can find together the answer to the question ‘what’s in it for me’.