Setup a Data Governance strategy

Have you ever set up a Data governance in your compavy ? Last week, I designed a Data Governance strategy, with the aim to deploy and scale up Data management. I share here with you the 3 directions chosen for this strategy :

• Data for All !
• Get benefits from Data
• Improve Data usage

Data for All !

Data culture has to touch every teams in our Business, because the usage of Data & BI can help each one of us to increase the knowledge and understanding of what is happening in our working scope. On one hand, data can impact directly the work : determinate trends, anticipate issues, understand causes. On the other hand, data impact your reporting : reduce time to produce reports, increase occuracy of data in the reports, improve look & design quality of the reporting. This can help any of us, whatever our job is. That's why I believe that a Data Strategy should lead to make the power of Data available to all teams in the business, and not only for a happy fews.

Get benefits from Data

This objective can be seen as obvious, but it is the basis of the success. You need to ensure that all the efforts put in extracting and displaying data provides value. Investments, devlopments, time and energy spent need to bring benefits. At this step, I can see 3 categories of benefits. First, improvment in the daily work quality, by raising the available amount and quality of data to take decisions. You will also improve team members' productivity, especially by reducing the time spent to produce reports to the management and others teams. A third benefit will be the possibility to raise your customers intimacy, raise your knowledge of their service usage, and use data to create self-service reports.

Improve Data usage

The point for this last direction of the strategy is to act on the key levers allowing a good usage of the data. Data need to be easily accessible and usable, for sure, the tools have to be up and running when necessary of course. But the key word, here, is TRUST. When users do not trust exposed numbers and values, they will let you know once, and probably never come back. You need to take care of the quality of data, control values, and work closely with the data owners and the data stewards to ensure a permanent data check.

The next step now is to envisage Metrics & KPI to measure and follow the effects of the Data Governance strategy. What would you choose as a metric for each strategic area ?