Accelerate Your Data-Driven Culture With 'Formalized Cumulative Responsibilities' Around Your Data Asset
Every organization has to be intentional about building a data-driven culture in order to harness the ROI in their data asset.
Organizations that proactively align themselves to exploit the treasure in their data can expect to create a competitive edge over their peers in the same sector.
If you're considering embarking on this journey of data exploitation, there are some questions to consider:
How is your organization embracing the current data-driven culture?
How are you realizing this new culture across your organization?
Are you waiting for things to happen naturally because you're producing more data than ever before in your ecosystems?
Are you expecting your investments to swiftly start materializing for you in terms of ROI simply because you've invested heavily in the 'latest and greatest' tools and data infrastructure in the market?
Or do you have a game plan of accelerating a data-driven culture in your organization?
The reality of this data-driven culture we're all marching towards can only be realized and capitalized upon if your organization is intentional about the necessary cultural transformation that comes with it.
This cultural transformation starts with 'people' and rests with 'people'.
The truth is that most organizations have done a good job investing in their data infrastructure due to regulatory scrutiny and market demands.
However, investment in people and human capital to create a sustainable data-driven culture is still lacking. A lot of the highly regulated environments have turned their attention to technology to drive their cultural transformation and growth.
The reality is that 70% of our investment in driving growth and transformation in this digital age can only be fueled by the power of people and community. The remaining 30% is where technology becomes an enabler to help realize our goals and strategy at an accelerated pace.
What is a Data-Driven Culture?
A data-driven culture means what it says.
It's a culture where data takes center stage to propel our operations and decisions to achieve all our strategic goals as an organization.
You've probably heard it said that 'data is the new oil'. This metaphor is no longer a debate as harnessing the limitless potential in our data asset could be the singular differentiator for us to forge ahead to meet our competing demands.
To this effect, we need to be intentional about creating healthy, trusted and business-ready data asset environment. We need to be intentional about fostering ethical creation and use of our data.
Preventing the introduction of impurities to your dataset as it traverses across the value chain is one of the most critical investments you can make. Get this right, and you save a lot of cost and pain during the downstream data consumption required for different strategic goals.
But how do we achieve this?
Building a formalized accountability of cumulative responsibilities through stewardship around the data value chain is the key to accelerating a data-driven culture.
What is 'Cumulative Responsibility'?
Cumulative Responsibility is a formalized accountability of stewardship around the data value-chain. It's a stewardship model that is key to achieving the necessary cultural transformation in a data-driven culture.
This focus on accountability has to be a top priority for your data strategy.
If your organization wishes to harness the untapped opportunities in their data asset, it must be intentional and proactive in building an unbroken chain of accountability and community of stewardship around its data value chain.
What does 'Cumulative Responsibly around data by stewardship' actually look like?
Cumulative Responsibility is a stewardship framework that recognizes every data citizen as an extension of the stewardship team.
Each data citizen engaging with the organization's data is recognized as a key actor within the data value chain.
The stewardship roles and responsibilities of each actor are clearly defined and formalized with clarity.
Each actor is trained in his or her responsibilities and empowered with the necessary tools to excel. Each role and Responsibility is periodically measured and incentivized.
Stewardship actors are identified and positioned throughout the enterprise data value chain to help ensure quality and controls are established, validated and maintained, throughout the data lifecycle from authoring to consumption.
Cumulative responsibilities ensure due diligence as data journeys through the enterprise ecosystem between the different actors (from hub to hub) for both internal and external purposes. This principle explicitly calls out and reinforces formalized handshake and handover of data between data providers and receivers throughout the data journey. Actors attest and sign-off data in their domain (both received and produced) before handing over to the next set of actors.
This formalized sign-off process is used to reinforce and attest to controls or gaps in the data in each actors handover.
The cumulative responsibilities promote traceability and an audit trail of data lineage.
They also ensure:
Effective documentation of the end-to-end controls of data from origination, aggregation to reporting
Appropriate levels of sign-off and certification to reinforce the criticality of quality and its integrity across the data value chain
Increased stewardship accountability and transparency (making sure all actors downstream of data origination have a full understanding of the purpose and use of the data they receive in their domain and maintains the same integrity in place before and during the handover process.
In summary, here are the key takeaways for accelerating a data-driven culture in your organization:
Be intentional in introducing your people and team members to their role in the new data-driven culture.
Educate everyone engaging data one way or the other in your ecosystem to realize they're now data citizens. They must recognize themselves as stewards of the data they engage with (either as a producer or a consumer).
Must advocate stewardship around the enterprise data asset as everyone's business.
Spell out their roles and responsibilities in the data value chain. Your people must understand a data-driven culture calls for a new way of doing business and this is critical to the organization's survival and growth.
Train, equip and empower your data citizens in their roles and responsibilities along the data value chain.
Communitize stewardship around data and build a sustainable cumulative responsibility around your data lifecycle.
Develop a cadence to perform periodic review and attestation of your cumulative responsibilities
Next Steps
Is your data governance program struggling to get traction?
Do you need help implementing a successful data stewardship operating model?
Why not discuss your challenges and explore some simple strategies for moving forward on my free Discovery Call: