You Can Kill Multiple Birds with a Single Stone…..Data Governance Is the Single Stone for Actualizing Your Competing Data Demands
The reality of many organizations today is that they have multiple data initiatives ongoing with competing urgency. Many face the challenge of prioritizing resources and investment to fulfill those various needs. If you're faced with this dilemma, this message is for you.
Many winning organizations are beginning to realize the value add of positioning their data governance adoption as an enterprise initiative to address their multiple data demands without compromising one with the other. The good news offered by an effective data governance adoption is that you can kill multiple birds with one stone by positioning data Governance as your number one prerequisite for every other data initiative.
Today, many organizations ignoring this critical fact will continue to struggle with their desired outcome on all other data initiatives without an effective Data Governance adoption in their organization.
Machine learning, Data Analytics, MDM in an ungoverned data environment will continue to fall short in realizing the optimal ROI for your organization if you're still sitting on the fence with your data governance adoption.
You simply can't innovate, grow and realize the needful edge in your data if you're not making data governance your number one priority to drive all your data initiative.
How can you effectively use Data Governance as the perfect recipe to manage your competing Data Demands?
Every organization needs to swiftly come to terms with the reality of competing data demands in today's market as our appetite for data continues to grow and data take center stage to drive our daily lives and business operations. The regulatory environment is also here to stay for many heavily regulated industries. i.e., the financial sector. Every organization will need to be strategic in fulfilling current and future data demands alongside one another.
Focusing on one data demand at the expense of the other or simply opening up multiple projects to handle each request has proven unproductive and very expensive. Many grapple with competing limited resources to fulfill different programs addressing their competing data initiatives.
The good news is that it's never too late for you to pivot your adoption strategy and recalibrate your go-forward strategy if you have previously kicked off your multiple data initiatives from a singular or regulatory lens. You now have an opportunity to position Data Governance as your singular investment for multiple yields. Thereby leveraging Data Governance to foster a proactive discipline of enabling your organization to manage, optimize, protect, and leverage your data asset holistically.
To this effect, I highly recommend having a holistic review of your organization's aspirational goals and competing data demands as you begin scoping your Data Governance adoption journey.
You need to review both your internal and external data demands side-by-side to better drive this to recognize complementary overlaps.
The following are some practical tips to help this exercise:
1) Review your current competing demands:
· Start with your organization's strategic goals: Highlight pressing needs in your near and short-term goals. A good understanding of where the organization wants to be should ultimately drive your governance execution.
· Identify any external data expectations for your organization: Typically regulatory and governmental. If not already called out in the organization's strategic vision, these must be highlighted as top priority fulfillment for your organization's governance compliance needs.
· Identify internal data expectations for your organization: It is crucial to understand the internal pain points of your data stakeholders. These are typically data needs needed for your organization's daily operational efficiency and decision support.
· Identify other data demands needed: These are typically data demands for your organization's survival and competitive edge in your industry?
· Review your consolidated data demand and call out needed governance expectations.
2) Consolidate your data demands and identify potential overlaps and similarities. Some of your regulatory needs might have similar data expectations you can fulfill in parallel. i.e. in a highly regulated industry like the Financial sector, you may have KYC(Know Your Customer) compliance demand to monitor your customer transactions and have a deeper understanding of your customers to fulfill the BSA/AML mandate. This may be an opportunity for you to tie this to your MDM initiative to Master your customer data and govern those data to fulfill both your compliance needs and your appetite for analytics, data science, customer loyalty, and other competitive edges at the same time. You want to find a way to tie your regulatory demand to your organization's strategic missions for obvious ROI beyond the regulatory lens.
3) Prioritize your consolidated data demands using a practical prioritization framework for your organization to drive the scope and order of your governance execution.
The goal of the exercise is to make sure 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 to frame your Data Governance adoption.
It will help position Data Governance as the catalyst to drive your competing, innovative, regulatory, market, and other demands.
Using Data Governance to build a holistic view and roadmap around your data demand will shine a better light at the heart of your competing data demands. It will allow you to harmonize your strategic vision as an organization with other external factors.
For Instance - Most of the regulatory demands have similar or complementary expectations organizations can harness to fulfill their other internal or market needs. i.e., boost their appetite for analytic growth and market insight for better decisions.
Here are a few of the current regulatory landscape in the Financial sector:
• GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation
• CCPA – California Consumer Privacy Act
• BCBS 239 - data governance, aggregation and risk reporting
• Basel III – counterparty, liquidity risk, enhanced capital ratios
• CCAR - Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review
• Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)/ Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
• Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)
It is worth highlighting a few of the regulatory goals, alongside some typical market demands in most organizations. i.e., Most organizations are striving for better data for:
• Improved analytics and competitive edge insight.
• An integrated view of their customers and product landscape.
• A consistent data definition and use of their data to mitigate risks and for better decision support
• …and more
By the same token, at the heart of most regulatory data demands today, we also have the following:
• Accurate and reliable data
• Transparency of the end-to-end data journey
• Consistent definition and use of data on all regulatory reports
• Active and complete monitoring across all customers' activities and transactions.
• Alignment of business data definition across the enterprise.
• Oversight and accountability over enterprise data.
Having a holistic view of your competing data demand is recognizing these demands often complement each other. Most of the competing data demands faced by many organizations simply strive for the same goal – Trusted, Governed, Optimal Quality Data. The deliverables for each are different, but the underlining factor is simply calling organizations to invest in the quality of their data to empower them to make better, faster decisions with accurate data as well as the demand to start building trust in their data with needed transparency and accountability around their end-to-end business operations.
In a nutshell, having effective Data Governance in place is the bedrock of every data-driven organization in our current global economy. It positions your organization with the needful winning strategy to accelerate both your current and future data needs.
Need some help activating your Data Governance adoption to address your competing Data Demands? Book a Free Call with me to discuss your challenges, and we can explore simple strategies to actualize your governance success. https://calendly.com/lara-gureje/30min