Overcoming Objections to Data Governance. White Paper

Transcription

1 Overcoming Objections to Data Governance White Paper

2 Table of contents... 3 Data Governance Objections... 3 Quick, Low Cost Wins... 4 Project Selection... 5 Project Difficulty... 6 Project Value... 7 The Quadrants... 7 Corporate Revenue... 8 Case Studies... 8 Analysts... 9 Data Governance Expert Sessions... 9 Data Governance for Mid-sized Business Talend Data Governance Made Affordable How Does Talend Support Data Governance? Talend MDM Final Word Page 2 of 14

3 You ve created a proposal for a comprehensive data governance program. You ve brought it up to management, but the bosses tell you there s just no budget for data governance. Now what? It takes time to win the hearts and minds of your company. As a data champion, you know that any resources spent on data management will pay for itself many times over. It is proven that creating a strategy for proactively managing data improves the effectiveness and value of almost any data intensive project. However, it may take some time for others to see its value. The task really comes down to forming good data management habits and conquering bad ones. This white paper discusses the techniques that have been successful for data champions as they sell the importance of data governance to their company. It examines guidelines for project selection as well as other techniques for overcoming objections to a data governance program. Data Governance Objections We are creatures of habit. Even in business, we get used to running day-to-day processes in a certain way. Change can be difficult for us. It s safer to follow the processes of our predecessors than to risk the consequences of change. Much of a data champion s job is to look for ways to break the cycle of poor data management and show our habitual colleagues a new and better way to do business. We can do this by: Creating and promoting low cost wins Picking the right projects to engage new data governance processes while tracking value Honoring the needs of the corporation with respect to revenue and expense Page 3 of 14

4 Leveraging external successes with data governance to promote our own needs Let s look at each of these objection-busting strategies in depth. Quick, Low Cost Wins Even if there is no budget to spend on information quality, a popular strategy is to shine a light on data governance while spending little or no money. It is not only possible to do this, but it may already be happening many times over in your corporation, while going unnoticed. You can break the poor data management habit by finding very simple information quality wins and celebrating them when you do. One inexpensive way to find a win is with data profiling. Talend Open Profiler, the first open source data profiling tool, can be freely downloaded from Talend.com and makes it easy to find all sorts of information quality problems in any of your company s database systems and enterprise applications. These data quality indicators can range from simple or advanced statistics to text string analysis, including summary data and statistical distributions of records. Let s say you use Talend Open Profiler to find some near duplicates in your ERP system. You find that part number Condenser and part number Cndsr exist as duplicated parts in your supply chain. After verifying the fairly obvious duplicate, work with the team in procurement to estimate how much it costs to store and hold these condensers in inventory. By making simple discoveries like this, you can begin to track and build up savings for the company. Then it s up to you as the data quality champion to market data governance as a real business initiative with real benefits. Have a business-focused elevator pitch ready when someone asks you what you do. My team is saving the company millions by ensuring that the ERP system accurately reflects inventory levels. One of the best ways to move your company toward a mature data management strategy is to publicize and promote quick wins. Page 4 of 14

5 Project Selection Data governance often takes the shape of a series of coordinated data management projects, and picking projects that cost little and pay off big is also a winning strategy. Since business value is so important, we want to make sure that the projects we choose provide the company with the best value. To aid in a choice between projects, it may help to think about your early projects on a Project Selection Quadrant as shown here. The chart plots the difficulty of completing a project versus the value it brings to the organization. Project selection quadrant Page 5 of 14

6 Project Difficulty To find the project on the X axis, project difficulty, you must understand how your existing system is being used, how various departments use it differently, and if there are special programs or procedures that impact the use of the data. To predict project length, rely heavily on your understanding your organization's goals and business drivers. Some of the factors that will affect project difficulty: Access to the data do you have permission to get the data? Can your data integration tool access the source data? Window of opportunity how much time do you have between updates to work on the data? Number of databases and packaged applications more systems will increase complexity Languages and code pages is it English or Kanji? Is it ASCII or EBCDIC? If you have mixed languages and code pages, you may have more work ahead of you Current state of data quality The more non-standard or incomplete your data is to begin with, the harder the task Volume of data data standardization takes time and the more you have, the longer it will take Governance, Risk and Compliance mandates is your access to the data, or your ability to correct it, stopped by regulation? Page 6 of 14

7 Project Value Project value comes from three business drivers: 1) lowering costs; 2) increasing revenue; and 3) lowering risk. For assessing project value (the Y axis), you ll need to have discussions with the business users around their ability to accomplish things like: being able to effectively reach/support customers call center performance inventory and holding costs exposure to risk such as being out of compliance with any regulations in your industry any business process that is inefficient because of data quality The Quadrants Now that you ve assessed your projects, they will naturally fall into the following quadrants: Lower left: The difficult and low value targets. If management is trying to get you to work on these, resist. It s busywork and you ll never get anywhere with your enterprise-wide appeal by starting here. Lower right: These may be easy to complete, but if they have limited value, you should hold off until you have complete corporate buy-in for a wider data management initiative. Upper left: Working on high value targets that are difficult to complete will likely only give your company sticker shock when you show them the project plan. Or, they may run into major delays and be cancelled altogether. Again, proceed with caution. Make sure you have a few wins under your belt before you attempt. Upper right: Low-hanging fruit. Projects that are easier to complete with high value are the best places to begin. As long as you document Page 7 of 14

8 and promote the increase in value that you ve delivered to the company, you should be able to leverage these wins into more responsibility and more access to great projects. Keeping an eye on both the business aspect of the data, its value, and the technical difficulty in standardizing the data will help you decide where to go and how to make your business stronger. It will also ensure that you and your business co-workers understand the business value of improving data quality within your projects. Corporate Revenue Today, companies manage spending tightly, looking at the expenses and revenue each fiscal quarter and each month to optimize the allimportant 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. Case Studies Case studies are a great way to educate your bosses and colleagues 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 a sales representative. Page 8 of 14

9 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. Page 9 of 14

10 Data Governance for Mid-sized Business Applications that help you manage data are often expensive, making it seem like data governance is a luxury that only large companies can afford. However, your company should be paying attention to data management whether you are a Fortune 1000 or a startup. Small to Mid-sized Enterprises (SMEs) have challenges with the investment needed in enterprise level software. While it s true that the benefit often outweighs the costs, it is difficult for the typical SME to invest in the license, maintenance and services needed to implement a major data integration, data quality or MDM solution. Talend Data Governance Made Affordable Talend offers something completely different in our world open source data integration, data quality and MDM. If you go to the Talend Web site, you can download some amazing open source software, like: Talend Open Studio, a fully functional data integration package Talend Open Profiler, a data profiling tool, providing charts and graphs and some very useful analytics on your data Talend MDM Community Edition, a complete MDM solution on single platform offering Master Data and Data Stewardship You can use these versions without limitations or you can enhance your experience from Talend Open Studio by purchasing Talend Integration Suite (in various flavors). You can take your data quality initiative to the next level by upgrading Talend Open Profiler to Talend Data Quality. Page 10 of 14

11 How Does Talend Support Data Governance? Talend Data Quality and Talend Open Profiler have the following functions to support data quality: Data Profiling - Many organizations have little or no idea as to the quality of their data. Talend Open Profiler discovers errors and anomalies in the customer's own data. More advanced data quality and data profiling are included with Talend Data Quality. Standardization - builds uniformity to the data and it helps a great deal with matching and deduplication. Talend Data Quality can use reference data, such as a list of common names and nicknames to normalize names. Address Validation - from partners like QAS, AddressDoctor, Postcode Anywhere can be used within a Talend Data Quality process to standardize the address. Matching - a Talend Data Quality feature of a data quality tool that links records within and across multiple databases to identify duplicate records. Enrichment - the Talend Data Quality feature of supplementing an organization s internal data with data from external sources. Monitoring & Business User Metrics - Talend Data Quality meets the needs of business users by providing a web-based Data Quality Portal that takes the analysis developed by the data steward and presents it in an easy dashboard format within a web browser. Page 11 of 14

12 Talend MDM If you want to take the combined data integration and data quality to an even higher level, Talend offers a complete Master Data Management (MDM) solution, which you can use in a more enterprisewide approach to data governance. There s a very inexpensive place to start and an evolutionary path your company can take as it matures its data management strategy. Built on open standards, Talend MDM is the first comprehensive solution for Data Integration, Data Quality, Master Data and Data Stewardship built on a single platform. Reducing complexity, it provides the necessary data stewardship tools that help teams efficiently collaborate on master data and meet data governance requirements. Additionally, Talend's unique, flexible Active Data Model allows organizations to quickly model and master any data domain, not just customers or products, and systematically improve access and reliability across enterprise systems. Talend MDM is available in two editions. Talend MDM Community Edition is provided under the GPL license and can be downloaded at no charge. Talend MDM Enterprise Edition is provided under a subscription license. Page 12 of 14

13 Final Word Most of the objections to a data governance program are financial. Companies will say they don t have enough money and resources to properly manage their data. However, if you start out inexpensively and follow the moneys lost, you can usually make some headway in breaking the old habits. Take a baseline measurement and track ROI, even if you think you don t have to. While your management may understand the value of your efforts, management can change. If the project has no ROI, consider not doing it. Find the ROI by asking the business users of the data what they use it for. Aggregate and roll-up our geeky metrics of nulls, accuracy, conformity, etc into metrics that a business user would understand like according to our evaluation, 86.4% of our customers are fully reachable by mail". Create and use the aggregated scores similar to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Publish them at regular intervals. To raise awareness of the data quality, talk about why it s up and talk about why it has gone down. Aristotle once said that We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Getting into the habit of properly managing data through data governance initiatives are processes that you change over time and not in a single instant. By taking small, deliberate steps and tracking value, you can drive your corporation in an efficient, profitable and compliant direction. Page 13 of 14

14 About the author Steve Sarsfield runs an award winning blog called the Data Governance and Data Quality Insider and is a popular public speaker on the topic, having delivered countless presentations at industry conferences and college campuses throughout the United States. Steve s book The Data Governance Imperative is a must-read for anyone interested in rounding out their knowledge of data governance. Steve is member of Talend s product marketing team. For more information on Talend's open data solutions: Contact information for your region: Talend. All rights reserved. Page 14 of 14