Focusing on Regulatory Compliance Alone is 'Microwave Governance'
What is Microwave Governance?
Many organizations kick off their data governance adoption in a reactive mode when faced with huge penalties and their backs against the wall. Trying to get out of the jail of their regulatory scrutiny. It is not uncommon for many financial institutions to kick off governance due to receiving MRAs and MRIAs from regulators or audit failures.
While many find themselves in this predicament, it is sad to say that we still have many organizations continuing with this fire drill approach with their data governance adoption.
The sad reality is that this reactive governance is not sustainable and ineffective. Continuing your governance adoption in a 'crisis mode' is simply a disservice to your operational efficiency and winning with your data. The earlier an organization realizes the cost of its ungoverned poor-quality data is beyond regulatory scrutiny, the better it is for such an organization to adopt a holistic lens around its data asset. With their data governance adoption, you can start winning by 'killing multiple birds with a single stone.
If you're a data leader and your organization is currently operating in crisis mode, It will continue to be a disservice to you and your organization not to reassess your governance strategy and pivot from a narrow lens regulatory mode to a holistic enterprise mindset of governing your data landscape in a holistic way to serve your multiple data demands and position yourselves for a healthy, thriving data-driven environment.
Operating a silo lens governance adoption is simply a 'microwave governance.' You will continue to play a catchup game with little or no ROI to show, and your competitive edge will suffer.
It is okay for your data governance program to prioritize your regulatory mandates as your highest priority to kill the fire on your immediate regulatory penalties. It is, however, critical for your governance adoption strategy to have a compelling roadmap to expand beyond the regulatory lens to support your other business initiatives.
The reality of regulatory-focused governance is that it's simply a checkoff of mandates for many organizations and not a revenue growth initiative. Your organization's strategic goals largely revolve around market growth and competitive edge. Hence, you equally need to be strategic in your game plan to leverage regulatory fulfillment to drive tangible ROIs to support your organization's vision. How you do that is to position your data governance adoption to realize your strategic vision and increase your bottom line, thereby creating a sustainable win-win for your organization
How do you pivot from microwave governance to a profit-led governance adoption?
Pivoting from a silo-lensed, microwaved or regulatory-focused data governance adoption to a profit-led adoption simply requires factoring in your competing data demands for a win-win adoption that shows tangible ROIs.
The following are some practical steps you must consider in crafting your governance execution strategy:
1) Evaluate each data demand:
• Start with your organization's strategic goals- It is always important to align your Data Governance adoption to your organization's immediate and long-term goals. A good alignment with your organization's needs should ultimately drive your governance execution.
• Identify any external data expectations for your organization. i.e, regulatory and governmental mandates. These are typically called out as top priority fulfillment for your organization's compliance needs.
• Identify internal data expectations for your organization- These are typically internal pain points of your internal stakeholders. They are data needs to accelerate your operational efficiency and internal decision support.
• Identify other data demands, i.e., Your organization's need for survival, your market share, and competitive edge in your industry
• Review your consolidated data demands and call out needed governance expectations around each.
2) Consolidate your data demands and identify potential overlaps and similarities.
Your regulatory demands might have similar data expectations you can fulfill in parallel. i.e., in a highly regulated industry like the Financial sector, you may have to meet the Know Your Data(KYC) compliance demand to monitor your customer transactions and have a deeper understanding of your customer to fulfill the BSA/AML mandate. This may also be an opportunity for you to Master your customer data and fulfill your customer 360-degree view and analytics goal. You have an opportunity to fulfill your compliance need, mitigate risk and grow your competitive edge at the same time.
3) Prioritize your consolidated data demands using an effective prioritization framework for your organization to drive the scope and order of your governance execution.
4) Create an agile, iterative roadmap of execution with measurable growth and data maturity over time.
This exercise aims to ensure you have a comprehensive picture of your organization's appetite for data and the aspirational vision of where your organization wants to be.
This will help you set a better template and framework to convince your senior executives and stakeholders to fund your Data Governance adoption.
It will help position Data Governance as the catalyst for addressing your competing data demands beyond regulations.
Why You Need a Holistic Governance Beyond Regulatory Lens:
The following are some of the key benefits of leveraging the governance of your regulatory program to drive a holistic enterprise data governance execution:
· It provides a baseline platform to quickly demonstrate the value and intent of your governance adoption to stakeholders.
· It's a faster and smarter way to build data maturity around your key enterprise data.
· It positions your governance delivery in an agile way for lessons learned from one delivery to be incorporated into subsequent efforts.
· It makes it easy for governance success to be measured and accelerated.
· It helps consolidate competing data demands with similar data quality or compliance goals.
· It helps make economic trade-offs and leverage your key resources.
· It empowers your decision-making around your governance execution.
Simply put, using Data Governance to build a holistic view and roadmap around your data demand is the smartest way to position your organization to start winning with your data asset. Adopting a holistic governance model for your organization could be the best investment you'll ever make with your data. This will drastically reduce yearly funding for your multiple data initiatives and shine a better light at the heart of your competing data demands. i.e., trusted, business-ready data. It will allow you to harmonize your strategic vision as an organization with other external factors.
Having a holistic view of your competing data demand recognizes these demands often complement one another. Most organizations' competing data demands are simply striving for the same goal – Trusted, Governed, Optimal Quality Data. The deliverables for each may be different, but the underlining factor is simply calling for an intentional investment in the quality of your data asset to optimize faster, accurate decision making and start building trust with needed transparency and accountability around your end-to-end business operations.
Interested in learning more on how to successfully manage your competing Data Demands and pivot from a silo-lensed data governance adoption to profit-led governance? Let's engage by Booking a Free Call with me to discuss your challenges, and we can explore some simple strategies to actualize your desired goals.
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