No Silver Bullet for Data Goverenance

I am pretty pumped up from attending the Gartner MDM Summit in Grapevine, TX.  Most of all I wanted to expand on one theme I took away which I shared on Twitter this past week.

Big take away for me this week at #GartnerMDM is that technology is a tool & YOU are the enabler to MDM & Data Gov.

— DataQualityChronicle (@dqchronicle) March 21, 2013

 

As I mentioned in the tweet, people are the key enabler in MDM and Data Governance initiatives. I met a lot of people at the Gartner MDM Summit this past week who seemed to be searching for technology that would be the enabler, or silver bullet.

In my experience, this is an incorrect way of looking at technology. Technology is just a tool. People can use the tool to enable progress in the initiative and, in that way, technology can be enabling. But people need to be the driver and accept that responsibility.

Here are a few ways I suggest going about doing so:

• LISTEN to the business about what's going wrong and correlate that to data so you can take action


• CORRELATE the business anecdotes to understand a core list of root causes


• DEFINE the effects of the root causes


• MONETIZE the effects


• BUILD a program around correcting the root causes

This short, simple list begins with a very important point that I don't hear a lot of IT colleagues talking about.  It is essential to listen to the business to learn where the pain is and what kind of issues it is causing.  Don't just listen to the complaints.  Drive these anecdotes to hard facts, rooted in data.  

You can buy all the technology you want, but unless you perform proper business analysis, you will struggle to gain meaningful insight and direction in your data governance program.