Data Owners - what's the first thing you should do?
Alex Leigh
Managing Partner at The Leigh Partnership | Co-Founder of ConnectED | Data Governance & Strategy Consultant for Higher Education
Once we’ve identified, allocated and trained our Data Owners then we’re done, right? Wrong! This is exactly the time we need to be mentoring that group as their role is not entirely intuitive.
Why is that? Well Data Owners should be members of your organisations senior leadership team with functional accountability for a domain. That’s a great start, but their data governance role extends beyond that and across the organisation. Inhabiting the owner role may, in fact, deliver a dis-benefit to their own functional area.
That’s a whole other post, but today I’m focussing on their other primary responsibility: empowering their stewards. The question Nicola Askham and I are repeatedly asked when training stewards is ‘where does the time for all this new work come from?‘
The answer is your data owner. It is within their gift to prioritise the governance activities over existing activities. Failing to do so puts the whole framework in jeopardy. So almost their first activity must be to reassure the stewards in their domain. I've developed a template to cover off the most important themes:
- Our organisation is fundamentally going to change the way it manages and uses its data.
- This is recognised and supported at the top of the organisation and it is a priority
- The reasons we’re prioritising it are: lower cost of operation, higher trust in data, developing new insights, staff motivation, customer experience, etc. We are also protecting ourselves against internal and external risk.
- As a steward your role is key and pivotal. You are the acknowledged expert in ‘a data domain‘. I recognise and respect that. As a result I will be giving you the time and authority to use that skills and knowledge for the benefit of everyone who works here.
- However, this is not a new job, A good part of it you already do now. The difference is now you have a strong mandate from me. We will work together to manage your workload to ensure you have everything you need to be a success in the role.
- There is training available. This will give you an excellent understanding of how the role fits into the wider picture and how you will fit within that.
- Once you’ve completed your training, we’ll sit down again and talk through how to make this happen.
This does presuppose you are intending to train your owners and stewards. If you’re not, then that’s a whole other set of problems you’ll be dealing with!
I make no apologies for reiterating that successful data governance is a people led change. If you don’t invest in those people, you will not be successful.
"That’s a great start, but their data governance role extends beyond that and across the organisation"? Yes, it should but... Recently I initiated a discussion on the hidden tension of the otherwise excellent tenet "Data is a corporate asset". When something is an asset it means it is valuable, so it needs care. And this is how we come to the idea of "data owners". The mandate is "care about the data is if you own it". But this "as if" is either not communicated at all or lost, when "data owner" is used repeatedly in different contexts. And we often end up with data owners which are fake and don't really care or are really possessive and behave as real owners, refusing to share beyond the pertinent security constraints. We end up with silos, of course, and data feudalism. And here comes the tension in "corporate asset", the more asset, the less corporate.?
Data Management Consultant, Data Governance, Data Architect, Data Modeler, Data Analyst, Speaker and Writer of Data Topics
4 年Great article!
Let’s forecast a better future—together | Adjunct Prof - UBC | Advisory - UCW | President - Plaid Analytics
4 年Great read, Alex Leigh. But I especially like how the visual shows the interconnections between different parts of the data governance puzzle. We had a data governance virtual round table at the Canadian Institutional Research and Planning Association (#CIRPA2020 / #ACPRI2020) conference this week and one of the big themes that was recommended by Canadian universities and colleges was to ensure that senior leaders are actively involved with data governance, and have the authority to make decisions and allocate resources. Often, this meant that they had to be at least a director level, usually higher. Many of the Canadian institutions I've spoken to have avoided the term "data owner" as they felt that constituents (students, employees, etc) own their data and that ownership can cause people to behave in a siloed way. But, I think the way you describe data owner is relatively synonymous with what some institutions have called "data trustees" - for example, the University of British Columbia https://cio.ubc.ca/data-governance/people Thanks for sharing - I'll share this article out to my network as I think there's growing interest in data governance both as a professional practice and as a required part of business.
Data Warehouse Records Quality SME
4 年Easy and simple job... ?? But...nice representation!!!!
Co Founder & Chief Commercial Officer at LEIT DATA | The Data Value Show Podcast Host | Winter Data Conference Host | #meandatastreets | London Low Key Data meet-up Host | Data Evangelist | Hardcore Data Nerd | Advisor
4 年Alex Leigh nice visual one pager. Really glad you gave quality on there. Data Owners need to be responsible for all aspects of the data they own. Attribution, Lineage, Quality, Business Impact and even Timing. Nice post.