Governing The Health Of Your Enterprise Data Is Everyone's Responsibility...
Your data is prime; your data is gold; your data is your edge. This is still more of a dream than a reality for most organizations today, as many strive and struggle to find the insight and competitive edge in their data. Many organizations have retired to continuous data cleaning and curation. They've settled with the poor-quality state of their data and simply opened a data fixing factory as their modus operandi, thinking their data can't be clean, trusted, and business-ready for optimal value. This is simply because they're not rightfully governing their data asset.
Many have kicked off data governance in theory and paper, but the effect of its value-add is hardly seen in their data culture.
Why is this so?
The mistake many organizations make today is to only localize the due diligence and stewardship around their data governance to those appointed into their data roles (Data Owners, Data Stewards, Data Custodians, etc.). The truth is that your data roles are your leaders to activate a governance rhythm around your enterprise data. They are your true champions to lead the way in your governance execution. But the responsibility of governing the health of your most critical asset, your data, must not stop there with them.
Everyone in your organization must realize that they're equally a steward of the data they engage daily one way or the other (as a consumer or a producer). Hence, the statement I often echo – 'Everyone is a Data Steward'. The readiness of any organization to optimize the value in their data asset can be seen in the seriousness of their data governance adoption.
Data Governance is a discipline of the cultural transformation of your people and your organization's data culture. The end in mind is a transformation of mindset in treating data with optimal care from creation through consumption to disposal.
Your data must be governed across its lifecycle to realize the optimal value. Simply put, everyone in your organization must clearly understand their role and expectations in the needful standards of care at every phase of your data journey, namely:
· Governance expectations at Data Creation
· Governance expectations at Storage & Development
· Governance expectations at Usage & Consumption
· Governance expectations at Data Sharing
· Governance expectations at Data Archival
· Governance expectations at Data Disposal
What does this mean? – It means everyone must be involved in this cultural transformation. Not just the formally appointed people to your data governance roles. Everyone in your organization is part of the data governance mission. You must approach data governance as an enterprise initiative. It is everyone's responsibility to play their role in the optimal health of the most critical asset of your organization, your data. This cannot be a casual initiative for the few. You cannot expect success in your activation if you don't appoint the right data advocates to lead the journey. Governance and Quality must be in your leader's DNA.
Why must Governance Adoption be activated as everyone's responsibility?
The unique offering of data governance and its adoption in every organization must focus on creating lasting cultural ethics in the treatment of data assets. For this to be actualized, you must intentionally build communitized stewardship with everyone's engagement as part of your Data Governance adoption. The following are a few of the quick wins and benefit of this adoption strategy:
· Communitized stewardship allows due diligence to be enforced and monitored by all actors and data citizens that engage the data around its lifecycle.
· It helps to build a sustainable guardrail around governed, trusted data once established to prevent recurrence of leakages, gaps, and re-introduction of quality issues.
· It provides a sense of responsibility for every data citizen engaging the enterprise data one way or the other. Thereby, cultivating the desired culture around the enterprise data asset.
· It allows data citizens to be equipped and empowered to play a critical role in enterprise data maturity.
· Traceability of Data Issues becomes easier and simplified.
· The cost of data fixes and temporal remediation of data quality recurring issues is significantly reduced once an organization 'communitize' stewardship along its value chain.
· Ultimately, the enterprise data maturity and trust around your data asset increases at an accelerated rate once stewardship is built around a data value chain.
How do you make everyone responsible for Data Governance In Your Organization?
1. Everything must start with Data Literacy and Awareness. There must be an alignment of understanding that data is critical to the success of your organization's growth and relevance. You must sensitize every data citizen to this understanding and make sure they understand where you're heading as an organization to be truly data-driven
2. Everyone must understand their roles and responsibilities even when they don't necessarily have the title of a data steward, a data owner or a data custodian.
3. Continuous mandatory training must be part of the rhythm for every employee to fulfill yearly to sensitize them around needful due diligence for their roles.
4. Data Ethics and expectations from each role must be measured as part of the yearly performance metrics.
5. Nominated Data Stewards and Owners must champion the cause to replicate stewardship mindset in their data communities.
6. Executive Management must drive and echo their seriousness around the ethics of data in the organization to activate needful transformation.
7. Every team member must have access to the established policies and standards around their data governance.
In a nutshell, making governance adoption everyone's responsibility in your organization as the data travels through its value chain will ensure that each handshake along your data journey is reviewed, validated, and attested between each stewardship actor (producer & consumer).
This will help accelerate your Data governance adoption and help actualize the end in mind to position your data asset for optimal value and success on all your other data initiatives. i.e., MDM, AI/ML, and other regulatory initiatives.
For more detail and help to activate a successful data governance with communitized stewardship around your Data value chain. Book a Free Call with me to discuss your challenges, and we can explore simple strategies for actualizing your governance success.
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