Overcoming Objections to a Data Governance Program

You’ve created a wonderful proposal for a comprehensive data governance program. You’ve brought it up to management, but the chiefs tell you there’s just no budget for data governance. Now what?

The best thing you can do it to keep at it. It often takes time to win the hearts and minds of your company. You know that any money spent on data governance will usually come back with multipliers. It just may take some time for others to get on board. Be patient and continue to promote your quest.

Here are some ideas for thinking about your next steps for your data governance program:

Corporate Revenue
Today, companies manage spending tightly, looking at the expenses and revenue each fiscal quarter and each month to optimize the all-important operating income (revenue minus expenses equals operating income). If sales and revenue are weak, management gets miserly. On the other hand, if revenue is high and expenses are low, your high-ROI proposal will have a better chance for approval.

For many people, this corporate reality is hard to deal with. Logical thinkers would suggest that if something is broken, it should be fixed, no matter how well the sales team is performing. The people who run your business have their first priorities set on stockholder value. You too should pay attention to your company’s sales figures as they are announced each quarter. If your company has a quarterly revenue call, use it to strike when the environment for spending is right.

Cheap Wins
If there is no money to spend on information quality, there still may be potential for information quality wins for you to exploit. For example, let’s say you were to profile or make some SQL queries into your company’s supply chain system database and you found a part that has a near duplicate. So, part number “21-998 Condenser” and part number “2-1-998 Cndsr” exist as duplicated parts in your supply chain.

After verifying the fairly obvious duplicate, you can ask your friend on the procurement side how much it costs to store and hold these condensers in inventory. Then use some guerilla marketing techniques to extol the virtues of data governance. After all, if you could find this with just SQL queries, consider how much you could find with a data discovery/profiling tool. Better yet, consider how much you could find with a company-wide initiative.  In a previous blog post, I referred to this as the low-hanging fruit.

Case Studies
Case studies are a great way to spread the word about data governance. They usually contain real-world examples, often of your competitors, who are finding gold with better attention to information quality. Vendors in the data governance space will have case studies on their websites, or you can get unpublished studies by asking your sales representative.

Consider that built-in desire of your company to be competitive, and keep your Google searches and alerts tuned to what data management projects are underway at your competitors.

Analysts
Analysts are another valuable source for proving your point about the virtues of data governance. Your boss may have installed his own custom spam filter against your cajoling on data governance. But he doesn’t have to take your word for it; he can listen to an industry expert.

If you own a subscription to an analyst firm, use it to sell the power of data governance. Analysts offer telephone consultations, reports and webinars to clients. These offerings may be useful to sway your team.  If you are not a client of these firms, go to the vendors. If there is a crucial report, they will often license it to offer on their website for download, particularly if it speaks well about their solution.

Data Governance Expert Sessions
This technique also falls within the category of “don’t just take my word for it.” You can find a data governance workshop from many vendors to assist your organization with developing your data quality strategies. Often conducted for a group, the session leader interacts with a group of your choosing and presents the potential for improving the efficiency of your business with data governance. As the meeting leader, you would invite both technologists and business users. Include those who are skeptical of the value a data-quality program will bring to their company; a third-party opinion may sway them. The cost is usually reasonable and it can help the group understand and share key concepts of data governance.

Guerrilla Marketing
Why not start your own personal crusade, your own marketing initiative to drive home the power of information quality? In my previous installment of the data governance blog, I offer graphics for use in your signature file to drive home the importance of IQ to your organization. Use the power of a newsletter, blog, or e-mail signature to get your message across.


Excerpt from Steve Sarsfield's book "The Data Governance Imperative"

Data Governance Structure and Organization Webinar

My colleague Jim Orr just did a great job delivering a webinar on data governance. You can see a replay of the webinar in case you missed it. Jim is our Data Quality Practice Leader and he has a very positive point of view when it comes to developing a successful data governance strategy.
In this webinar, Jim talks exclusively about the structure and the organization behind data governance. If you believe that data governance is people, process and technology, this webinar covers the "people" side of the equation.

Data Governance – Does it take a platform?

I was reading through a major enterprise software vendor’s white paper and their recommendations on how to launch a data governance program. (I’m not going to provide a link - it wasn’t worth it.) Of course, much of the messaging was around buying software and the “platform” you need to do data governance… their platform.

Yet, I’m not sure it’s the wisest choice to start by buying a data governance platform. If your solution to data governance is to buy software, then you’re not really doing data governance. So much of data governance is about things like getting executives to recognize data as an asset, setting up processes, planning teams and resources, the politics of data ownership, understanding the goals of the organization and making decisions about data to support them, and so on.

Now I know it’s blasphemy for a guy who works for an enterprise software company to talk like that. In the past, I probably have been guilty of pushing the platform over process improvements. But, it’s a new day. I see real successes starting to emerge from companies who begin by taking a look at the strategy and process of data governance in the context of their business plan. Companies are beginning to soul-search a bit, before buying a platform, to know how ready they are for data governance and plan their maturation process.

Why not bring in some expertise on data governance first? Bring in the right mix of technology and business experience to build a plan, build a process and work through the politics of data governance first. There are some pretty good systems integrators out there who can help. We have partnerships with Accenture and Deloitte, for example, and they have helped set strategy on many projects.

Trillium Software also has a growing business around the business strategy of data governance. These programs are run by an arm of our professional services team called strategic services, and they too are really starting to show promise, as they work hand-in-hand with our customers to set up the processes and strategy of data governance, opening up communications between IT and management on data governance. These include the following programs:

• Data Quality Workshop - a knowledge sharing exercise that incorporates interactive group dynamics, analytics, and presentations to learn about the customer’s business, understand and share key aspects of a total data quality solution, and determine how to best solve business problems through a comprehensive data quality program. We’ll come in for a couple of days and help you through some of the data governance strategy.

• Strategic Planning Services - a service offering that helps you to build a future vision for data quality that optimizes processes and improves data quality enterprise-wide. This service focuses on future data quality strategies such as dealing with complex enterprise data quality deployments, expansion of data quality initiatives and the effects of mergers and acquisitions on the business.

• Data Governance Planning – This service helps organizations with developing, refining, and supporting their data governance strategies and programs. It recognizes that data quality by itself does not define data governance. Rather, it also includes a focus on business processes and people to achieve success.

If this is something that your company needs, send me an e-mail and I’ll set it up for you, or find out more here. These workshops are particularly helpful if you have some key stakeholders dragging their feet on data governance. They can help you all get on the same page.

Does it take a platform to do data governance? Maybe, but data governance is a far-off dream for many companies. In this case, it takes a lot more than technology to fulfill a dream.