Formalize Your Data Role to Activate Effective Governance.
Every organization embarking on a data governance journey must understand that the most critical success factor is organizing the right people in the form of stewardship around your data asset. Many organizations continue to struggle through this journey simply because they fail to understand this critical path and the most essential building block in their execution framework.
Building the proper stewardship of critical roles and responsibilities around your data governance execution is the number one recipe to operationalizing your governance adoption. Actualizing optimal health and value-add for your data requires proper positioning of your people and processes to activate needful cultural transformation.
Many organizations have identified and appointed data roles for their data governance execution casually without fully understanding the ramifications of this setup. For your roles and responsibilities to be taken seriously, they must be formalized and recognized enterprise-wide.
Why Formalize Your Data Roles?
Governance without formalization of people and processes will be short-lived as adoption will not gain the needed grassroots advocacy. Here are some of the reasons you should formalize your data roles:
· To prevent your governance execution from crawling and failing to deliver promised values.
· To fully activate and signal your readiness to take your data governance adoption from paper to action.
· To activate accountability of due diligence by every data citizen.
· To put a structure in place around your governance and promote cross-functional collaboration.
· To prevent your data roles been treated as a side job. Appointees would not prioritize their assigned responsibilities as important if their roles are not formalized.
· To promote cultural awareness of winning with data as enterprise adoption of data governance and needful cultural transformation will be very slow where roles and responsibilities are not formalized.
What are some of the values of Formalized Data Roles environment?
1. A formalized data roles environment signals your organization is ready to make stewardship of your data asset a number one priority and the new norm for the organization.
2. It signals to every data citizen that it is no longer business as usual, and recognizing these roles is pivotal to the organization's success.
3. It activates a serious sense of responsibility for every data citizen around needful due diligence in their daily operations.
4. It provides transparency around roles and responsibilities with expectations for each data role.
5. It provides a platform for formal recognition of data leaders in their constituents and enterprise-wide.
6. It accelerates an organization data maturity and governance journey
7. It promotes the realization of a governance adoption value add and ROI
How to Formalize Data Roles
The following are a few practical tips to formalize your data roles effectively:
· Foremost, when embarking on a data governance role formalization, you must understand the end in mind with your data governance adoption journey.
· There must be a sound, and well-established executive council and data governance council positioned as the oversight to formalize every role appointed
· The Data Leaders and Governance Council must lead the formalization of the role.
· The formalization process must include vetting of each appointed role and the ratification by the governance council.
· Recognize best candidates with the right DNA for each role and responsibility. Your data roles will be the break or make of your governance success.
· Every appointed candidate must fully understand their roles and responsibilities with expectations.
· Define KPIs for each data role and tie it to each candidate's annual performance evaluation.
· Share KPIs with each candidate and set rightful expectations they'll be measured with as part of their performance appraisal.
· Every data role must be formally publicized and communicated enterprise-wide.
· Incentifying each role must be built into the yearly performance evaluation of every data citizen.
In a nutshell, the seriousness of your data roles and responsibilities is your key driver to win and keep winning with your data governance adoption journey.
Hence, formalizing each role and responsibility through proper identification, engagement and ratification must be part of your governance adoption strategy to actualize your governance goals and create a win-win for your organization.
Need some help setting the tone for your data governance adoption with effective roles and responsibilities activation? Struggling with gaining grassroots advocacy with your governance adoption for success?
Book a (free) discovery call with me to discuss your challenges, and we can explore some simple strategies to actualize your desired goals.
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