Hey you got a plan, that should be enough right? I mean you’ve got those shiny new forms, you’ve got a process map, sent out the email with a deadline, asked people for ideas to contribute, you have a target number to reach, what else is there??
Well, imagine you launched a new plan for parent engagement. You've got caseworkers making home visits, they are conducting case plan staffings, offering services and supports– seems like they are doing the work, but how do you prove it's making a difference? That's where information governance can help you show your receipts. Let’s take that example as the throughline of this article. Ready - go
Alignment with the Vision
This is one of the easier parts, are you aligned with the messaging? Here’s some things that you should hear related to information governance efforts:
- Tracking Engagement: Beyond a Checkbox: information governance helps you go beyond tracking the percentage of parents that had 1 contact in a given month. Track the quality of engagement: how often parents participate, their level of involvement in activities, and specific changes in their behavior or skills. Granular data paints a clearer picture of your program's impact.
- Measuring Outcomes, Not Just Outputs: It's not just about how many times you saw someone, but whether engagement led to positive change. information governance ensures you're capturing the right metrics – improved child-parent interactions, increased parental knowledge, reduced stress levels – the outcomes that truly matter.
- Identifying Barriers: Data can reveal patterns you might not see otherwise. Are certain demographics less likely to participate? Are there barriers like transportation or childcare that need to be addressed? With good information governance, you can spot these issues and tailor your program for greater success.
- Telling a Compelling Story: Good information governance means having clean, reliable data that you can transform into a compelling story of your program's impact. This is essential for securing funding, gaining support from stakeholders, and advocating for policies that help families thrive.
Let’s get out of the Exec Table and into the Middle Management Layer
Yeah those last ones are easy enough to say right? But you’re a middle manager so how do you take the message from the top and help make a difference with information governance. As a middle manager, your role is to:
- Talk about Data Collection: Seriously, this one is pretty simple, just talk about the information being entered into our system because it matters how people enter information. Be factual, be neutral, be timely. Your people already know their work matters, so help them see the pride in entering quality data.
- Advocate for Improvement: If something you see could make things better or easier for your teams to do their work well, speak up. Sure the answer could be no, you could feel embarrassed that you didn’t think of something, but do it anyways. Your ideas may not be the ones that win the day, but having them heard will contribute to the diversity of ideas.
- Partner with Data Experts: Collaborate with data stewards, analysts or IT to create reports and visualizations that clearly demonstrate the impact you are looking to achieve in a way that you can use it to take action.
Let’s Get a Little More Tactical
Above are more soft actions, these ones are tangible:
- Create Countermeasures: Use your data to identify areas for improvement and make adjustments. Now when you are doing this it’s important to review your data, but know that most business decisions are made without 100% certainty. Be willing to make changes based on the evidence, but don't be afraid to try new things if you see something that is at 80%.
- Seek out Successes: Communication is so easy, and so easily messed up. If you want to communicate the impact of your change you need to get information, so have a conversation with your employees or with families, and when you find positives share them.
- Create venues for discussion: Overnight success almost never happens. You need to create venues for your teams to talk about the changes they are making to support the end goal. If they can see your support of their learning and that you listen for challenges you can help mitigate, then you can create resilience.
Now you have some specifics about how your role in the middle management layers can help with information governance using a specific example in child welfare. In this example, it wasn’t just about saying this data is families - not numbers, and it isn’t just hammering a chart every week.?
So let’s zoom back out a little, being in a middle management role, information governance can seem like it’s a far and away sort of problem. One that is hard to figure out what your role is in making a difference. But now you have one example, it's about being the leader that translates a direction from the executive table into messaging and action that is connected to the front line experience. Take actions where you can, seek feedback, be an advocate, and please communicate - up, down, lateral, out. Your roles are one of the most important in any large scale change being realized. And you don’t hear thank you enough, so - thank you!
And now when you see that next initiative coming - step up to the plate and knock it out of the park! And when you do, just remember to build your succession plan, because you’ll be going places.
