Last week, at the CDO Forum, Europe, CDOs and data governance experts from RSA, RBC Capital Markets, Leeds Building Society, GE Capital and Beazley shared their insights on innovative and engaging Data Governance. What they discussed centred around overcoming negative, stigmatised views of Data Governance and winning internal buy-in to improve data quality, processing and lineage for the purpose of meeting regulatory compliance.
However, as these sessions and subsequent conversations with US-based CDOs in the days that followed the event showed, Data Governance doesn’t have to stop there. Whilst the core purpose of Data Governance is to meet the demands of the regulators, there is much more to it. In fact, as argued by RSA’s CDO David Watkins, Data Governance is the ‘secret ingredient’ to successful Data Analytics. Without effective Data Governance, you can kiss goodbye to any impactful insights you may look to generate.
The key to a valuable and successful Data Governance implementation is to Protect and Enable.
Firstly, as discussed above, a Data Governance programme needs to satisfy the ever-changing demands of the regulators. If it doesn’t fulfil this basic Protect element then it is a failure and a waste of resources and money. As one CDO put it to me, this is the ‘blocking and tackling’ function of Data Governance; the defending and guarding of the organisation. Depending on your choice of football, there's no point having a star striker or franchise quarterback if your defence/defense is weak and ineffective.
However, to go beyond that, Data Governance needs to Enable stakeholders and business functions to operate more efficiently. Once you’ve successfully defended, you need to be able to launch an effective counter-attack. This is where Data Governance can shift its tags as being boring or an necessary evil by providing real value to the business.
By providing clean, well tracked and effectively managed data, CDOs can enable and empower their colleagues to make better decisions about the way the conduct their business, the way their customers interact with their organisation or how to find new customers. To do this, though, you will need money. The key to securing funds for a wide-scale Data Governance programme, as with anything in business, is to provide a compelling ROI. Here, it is imperative that the outcomes of your Data Governance or Data Quality initiative are closely aligned to the main business drivers of your organisation and that they will result in increased revenue or cost cutting in vital areas.
Therefore, whilst it may not always be the Head of Data Governance (or the CDO in some cases) going on to use the clean, accessible and accurate data, they are the ones that are enabling others to innovate, solve business problems and gain competitive advantage. Without effective Data Governance, though, this is just a pipe dream. After all, as one CDO said at the CDO Forum, Melbourne in August, ‘for every $1 spent on Data Analytics, up to $3 can be lost through poor quality data’. Therefore, Data Governance is far from boring, it's the key to your future innovations and analytics success.
By popular demand, the Chief Data Officer Forum, Europe is coming back to London on May 10-12. For more information on how you can be involved in the next set of discussions, please visit: www.chiefdataofficereurope.com. Data Governance and Data Quality as the building blocks for successful Data Analytics will be explored in even greater detail next January at the inaugural CAO Forum, East Coast in New York City. For more information, please visit: www.chiefanalyticsofficerforum.com.
Adam Plom is the Global Head of Content for the CDO Forum. Adam has organised numerous CDO Forums in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia and recently featured in a Financier Worldwide magazine interview, titled: The Evolution of the CDO, as well as co-authoringThe Chief Data Officer Forum Review. For enquiries, email: adam.plom@coriniumintelligence.com.
