Although it’s tempting to ignore it, IT, you still need the business side to have a successful information governance initiative.
Lots of times, customers ask me how mature the EIM market is, especially around information governance. I understand their confusion. The industry has been talking about data quality, master data management, and information governance for decades. So the market must be mature, right? Most companies must have had some success with information governance, right?
Sadly, no. (See the blog on the Information Difference report for more on this topic.)
Just a few days ago, I was talking to a customer who was all fired up about the prospect of information governance, especially profiling and assessment. He loved the notion of putting the business in charge of defining general goodness for critical information elements. He loved the idea of operationalizing these measures to track how the company was doing. Even more so, he loved the idea of proactively tracking these measures to perhaps avert a major crisis that cost his company loads of cash.
All good—very, very good.
I was involved because the customer wanted best practices for implementing information governance.So, I asked him two of my go-to questions: “Who’s your business stakeholder? Who’s feeling the pain from the business side?”
“Ummmm….ummmm…I don’t know. I don’t really have a business stakeholder,” he replied.
My response: you’re going to need that.
Success Information Governance Needs Business Insight
You may have a very informed, business-centric IT staff that inherently understands the problems of poor information governance. I love these people—but you still need to find your friends of data on the business side. It’s a must.
Without your friends of data, you’ll have trouble establishing the core elements of a successful information governance program:
- Meaningful success metrics, like average time to create a new pricing item (percentage of nulls on a specific data element doesn’t count).
- Business-value-centered KPIs, like decreased days sales outstanding numbers.
- Multi-project, program-focused resources that help you establish policies, standards, metrics, and people that are focused on reuse across the enterprise.
- Reasonable execution speed, which requires business input. IT cannot define what Revenue means. IT can try to define what revenue means, but it’ill require 50 times more iteration than if business defines it. If business is involved, execution is faster, because buy-off happens quicker.
Business and IT collaboration is nothing new. The industry has been talking about it for ever. Yet, many customers still find this collaboration difficult to accomplish.
Like or not, it’s something you need. To get started, create your own Data Quality Tales of Woe book.
How do you manage business/IT collaboration? How do you find business stakeholders?