 And welcome to Data Diversity Talks, a podcast where we discuss with industry leaders and experts how they have built their careers around data. I'm your host, Shannon Kempe, and today we're talking to Teresa Ansek, the data governance strategist at Acura Business Services. More and more companies are considering investing in data literacy education but still have questions about its value, purpose, and how to get the ball rolling. Introducing the newest monthly webinar series from Data Diversity, Elevating Enterprise Data Literacy, where we discuss the landscape of data literacy and answer your burning questions. Learn more about this new series and register for free at DataVersity.net Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Kempe and I'm the Chief Digital Officer at DataVersity, and this is my career in data. A Data Diversity Talks podcast dedicated to learning from those who have careers in data management to understand how they got there and to be talking with people who can help make those careers a little bit easier. To keep up to date in the latest in data management education, go to DataVersity.net forward slash subscribe. And today we are joined by Teresa Ansek, the data governance strategist at Acura Business Services, and normally this is where a podcast host would read a short bio of the guest, but in this podcast, your bio is what we're here to talk about. So Teresa, hello and welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here and I just want to mention, give a shout out, thanks for being on our recent Enterprise Data Governance Online conference, you gave an amazing talk that everyone is still raving about. Thank you. Make sure you haven't checked that out, make sure you do. So, tell me, you are the data governance strategist at Acura Business Services. First, what is Acura Business Services and what is it that you do? Acura Business Services is a data governance strategy and slash consulting, but mostly strategy. Company that I started, I think I got a DBA back in 1996. And so I started working with companies in data warehousing early on. And I had, I was putting together for different organizations, high performance data warehouses with a team of programmers that were skilled and SQL programming and ETL. And so we did, I did that for a while and then I got, I got bored and wanted to move on. So I took a deep dive into data visualization and I started helping people pull together their business intelligence together. And I was much deeper dives than I think is normal. And then I went into business intelligence team development, where I was putting together data operations and helping organizations really focus on their production level projects and making sure that the health and wellbeing and care and data quality of their data pipelines were in top health. And then came along data governance and I was like, Oh my gosh, it was like lightning and thunder and it was just like this is what you need it all along so I am now fully enveloped in data governance and helping organizations create roadmaps for their policies, procedures and bringing together all of the dimensions so that everyone can contribute to and draw from the centralized governed area and have activities that normally are not value added become highly value added and get their capacity back. That is awesome. I love that. So, before I get more into that, let's back it up a bit. And so tell me, Teresa, when you were very young, is this what you dreamt of? I'm going to be, I'm going to specialize in data governance when I grow up. I was going to be on MTV when I was very young. I am so glad that the internet was not around in those days. I waited tables for a long time. I knew that I wanted to do something in computers. In the early 90s, I worked for almost nine years setting companies up on automating their accounting packages because the PC came out in 1982. And there was all kinds of accounting possibilities and people were just racing towards that automation in their work environment so I spent a good deal of time consulting just in setting up accounting and finance which was a really great start to doing data governance. There's a lot of similarities. But I never had to teach accounting while I was setting it up. And now I'm finding that when I'm setting up data governance, I'm actually teaching data governance at the same time. So it makes it a little bit more exciting. Oh, that's nice. So how did you, so you just spent, this has been your career. Yes, I've been doing this for 30 years. Yep. That's amazing. So, tell me, so having worked with data for, for that long and almost your whole career. What, what is your definition of data and how do you work with it. Wow, what is my definition of data I remember early on. I was working on a data project, it was a big extensive data project and we were not, nobody on the team was getting much sleep. And I had this dream that I was inside the application and everything was moving and blocks and they were blue blocks and pink blocks and they had different cues and they were traveling through space going to different destinations and I was like, Oh, this is data and I was looking at I was like in it okay so that's a little weird. I, I think of data as a puzzle, I think that the wall of information that organizations are dealing with is growing higher and wider every week. And the challenge is being able to identify the bricks in the wall that are critical to the operation, and then take meticulous care of those bricks as an asset. And so, being able to adapt to the growth of information that organizations are dealing with, and keep them maneuverable and adaptable and consistent and curated and quality is what I find to be very exciting to me. My nieces and nephews are young and we're at the family party and they say entry so what do you do and I tell them I get paid to do puzzles all day. Because it kind of it kind of is very similar to that it's like this is the puzzle and the problem and we need to solve it. So, that's kind of how I think of data. I love that, you know, I have conversations with a lot of different people who are constantly struggling to communicate what it is they do for a living. I love that answer. I told a story about my daughter we were driving home in a car from Tennessee and she asked me what is data governance and she was in a 13 hour car ride with me. Oh, that poor girl I think she wanted to run out of the moving vehicle because you know I'm so passionate about it I started explaining to her. And the good thing she came home and changed her major and she is she went into information technology after that and since graduated so kind of been that painful. I love that. So, well tell me okay so let's dive into that passion a little bit. So, as you so data governance is was your aha moment and that's your, that's your discovered passion. You know, a lot of what I built the agenda around is people struggling to, it's because we run into so many people struggling to understand what data governance is get data governance buy off in their company. It seems to be a dirty word their executives who just refused to say data governance they just they don't like the word at all they think it's, it's so restrictive. It sounds like it's just about policy and laws and, and so let me ask you what you think data governance is and why people should use it. I, that's interesting. I was posed with a question this past week by leadership at an organization, and they were like well why should we do data governance I mean who's even asking for it, and why do we need it, and I responded with. Why do you need finance. I mean think about it I can write checks without an accounting system, we can write checks and we can make deposits. So why are we spending all this money and finance department and keeping track of our payables and receivables and things like that. And I know that that is a different, but when you put it that way. Imagine if you pulled your finance department out of the company and people have done it for years for centuries we didn't have debit and credit accounting. But now we do. And can you imagine not having that in your organization but can you also imagine trying to convince an organization that doesn't have it that they need it. I can convince them of all of the debits and credits and that how the system works and and the difference that it'll make for them and regulatory and being able to track whether they can afford to make a business decision, and what their total liabilities are compared to their assets. It's a big conversation. And so I think that what I've tried to do is hone my abilities to be able to take this complex thing and boil it down and help people understand why they need it. And sometimes putting it the way I just did can be impactful, hopefully tell me what you think. And that is a great comparison. I've never heard it put that way but it makes so much sense because you know how do you make great business decisions with so much business so many business decisions are made on the financials right, you know, and what you have and what you need and where you can reallocate those those expenses so. So I love that so it explained but tell me more about data governance and the benefits that people that companies can have from implementing great data governance. Yeah. I think it really, there's two things that I see. When I hear the leadership saying, you know, I don't understand what we need data governance and and what is the benefits. There is a lot of things that they may not have enough transparency around in their data ecosystem. So, for instance, we have 18 adverse data events this month. Here are the adverse data events and I'm telling you how much each event cost us. So this event was a third party vendor that sent the wrong data three days in a row the data went through our whole system and people consumed that data, made decisions on that data and then we had to backtrack, then we had to do an emergency fix and production. Then we had to do all this communication that data event was a $27,000 data event to fix not to mention the risk and the other things, but are the leaders aware that this even happened. Are they getting that transparency this is why the Executive Council is so important because the Executive Council should be aware of how many adverse data events we have. How many details failed last month. How many people did it take to fix it. How many assets were impacted by that and how many individuals were looking at those assets or wanted to look at them and had to wait to make decisions based on that. And so if you don't have any way of providing transparency around those types of events. It's very difficult to see the need for and the benefit of data governance in your organization. Another example is just how much more lean and efficient your entire IT operation and data consumption layer is the application upgrade upstream. Now we if you have lineage we can identify all the downstream assets and make sure that they're in alignment. With when they go to production, we've put our new and improved assets and it's it's transparent to our customers that we just had a major upgrade and modified 17 different fields from our data consumption layer. And that is good. You can be proud of yourself with that. If they passed that project, they would call and say here's a list of things that are going to change and here's the date they're going to change and then the bi team would get the list. And then they would have to open all the, all the tables and ETLs where they can fit and find all of that. Well, we just did that for them and cut the project expense down by 25%. But they don't know that that is a benefit of this. So it's really the focus and getting the executive council to understand the health and well being of the data ecosystem to participate in the adverse data event and get real with the cost. Third party data is some of the worst data I see in organizations. And so one of the techniques that I used was to bring the vendor relationship manager and now I have a business owner at every adverse event. So as long as we were just dealing with it and somebody in the bi team was calling somebody at the company and then betwixt the two of them, they were getting it fixed and this vendor was like, so frustrating. We said, when we're frustrated, you're going to be frustrated with us. We're just sucking the joy in the capacity and the morale out of the team. We need visibility so that you can see that there's a problem here. And when we got that visibility and started reporting that up, they were like, this is unacceptable. I can't believe this has been going on for so long. So a lot of my clients I'm working to get transparency around these events, educate the executive council on the benefits of data governance, but just explain to them how it's going to turn these non value added things into value added things when you have data governance tools, transparency collaboration, and, and you're making it available for everyone. That's really important, you know, just to point out there I just, so one of the biggest things that you do in part of data governance is communication. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a big component who are you communicating what to on what media how often, but it gets more complex than just pulling together communication when we're trying to get our transparency around data events, and reporting back logs and things like that. It's communication and education and training. With a robust catalog of courses offered on demand and industry leading live online sessions throughout the year, the Dataversity Training Center is your launchpad for career success. Browse the complete catalog at training.dataversity.net and use code DB talks for 20% off your purchase. So let me, I'm trying to figure out a couple of different questions here that in this couple things that I want to touch on but let me let me go back to my original questions. And I'll come back to this a little bit do you see the importance of data management and the number of jobs working with data increasing or decreasing over the next 10 years. I want to say, it's a hard call because I originally I saw them increasing but I think they're going to change. I think they may level off but I think that the, the style and the tools are going to change. I think that with chat GPT and the opportunities for AI to monitor and respond. I think that with the advancement of being able to create the data quality proactively and send the quality back to the business for remediation before it breaks your downstream assets. I think those things are going to change. I think that the data stewards sitting on the business side are going to have a broader role in identifying data definitions, helping us curate the reports and things like that. So there, there, I think it's going to change I think for a long time data and business intelligence teams were were kind of isolated. And we had the pipelines and it was all kind of magic that we and we alone did and I think that that is going to expand. So, although the, I think that the data professionals are going to be doing more and exciting. I think that the morale is going to increase because we now are very proud of what we're doing and we don't feel like we're just trying to run roughshot across a sprint to get an asset into production that's going to break 13 times over the next month. We know those terms we know where to find them in the business glossary we know we've got reusable codes so we can gather it the same way it's been gathered all along. And we're confident when we put it out there, you're confident in what we're putting out there as a customer so I think it's going to be an exciting time to be in data. And I think that the sum of the items in data are going to be sprawled through the organization, I think everyone's going to have a responsibility to increase their capability and responsibility to the data of the organization. So what advice then would you give to people looking to get into a career in data management, maybe specifically data governance. Data governance is not for the week. There's a lot of explaining there, you have to be okay with adjustment pivoting. As challenges with focus, there is always that data owner that is not that's going to dip out because this isn't what they signed out for this isn't my role I'm over here trying to run a business what are you talking about. So you'll have the data stewards that want to put in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are sandwiches with peanut butter and jelly in them. As definitions, and we need to be able to use a lot of different techniques to really bring the consistency and the company together and the same goal. So somebody that's new working with data is an exciting time. It's the tools are amazing and rich and vast and the environments are complex. So you've got Kafka streaming you've got AWS you've got to no dough and then it's just so cool when you get into this robust ecosystem. And you come in with data governance and and start pulling all of that metadata into a single source and the benefits so a new person coming into data, come on in and it's going to be, it's going to be a good time. Very good advice. So, okay, how do you keep up with the technology that's coming out because it's pretty it's evolving pretty quickly nowadays right. It is. I am going to say that for that I have a large network of people I'm in a lot of the forums online asking questions. I reach out to my, I reach out to friends that I worked on my teams from 10 years ago, shout out to Victor, and Peter. And, you know, we get together and we're like hey what's this new thing what do you know about it and then you know the next day we call each other again and go this is what I found out. What did you find out. And it's just been great you find other people that are just as passionate about it and I don't know passionate obsessed. But I also found in communities, especially communities like the Dataversity which I love you guys. There are so many people that are willing to take the time to help each other to learn, point them at something, give them a document share something that they might have other it's not all about the money. So, you know, I'd like to give the world a coke. I'd like to get them all on data governance. Do love that about the community. I said that everyone is so willing to help each other out and it is saying enough I think I've said it in a few of these, but let me say it again. If you need help, there's so many people willing to help. I know, I know, it's great. I want to come back a little bit to the data governance then so if I were a company, looking to start a data governance initiative. What would be your advice and Okay, I call myself a strategist because sometimes when I'm working with larger companies they've got a very extensive maturity assessments that they come in that are 600 questions or more. And they do this very, very fancy thing and they present you with 717 to 70 page PowerPoint presentation. And that's not what I do. What I do when somebody calls me in and says, we're looking at this what do we need I first want to, I'd go through five, five exercises what are your drivers. I've tried to do this before and stopped and what stopped you. Where did we go wrong. Where are what problems are you start trying to solve and what is your data strategy if your strategy is that you're doing data governance because you have a data lake that is going to look like a different roadmap. And then if your strategy is that you're looking at, you know, plugging into your data warehouse or understanding your data ecosystem for privacy management. So if privacy management is then is your number one data strategy then we're going to plug into that so I really need to plug into your data strategy. Future vision, if you don't have one I want to help you carve something out and see, you know, let's try this on and let's try this on. What is your view, what do you think data governance is. Part of that conversation is level setting the definition of data governance because that's where you find that one person is like data governance is based on policies and you enforce the policies and you publish them and you hold people accountable to the policy and then it's like well wait a minute let's take a look at our data demand layer and find out what what terms are being used the most on our assets because you know we need to deliver consistency. So, what is your flavor of David data governance I, I try to focus on delivering consistency if you are using a formula. And in that formulas on 27 reports, I want to make data governance. It help ensure that that is the same calculation on all 27 reports, you'd be kind of surprised how often it's not. You know, some fireworks to, but being able to say we're getting it from the same place, we're handling it with quality standards. We're delivering it the same way in in the most efficient way. And we're delivering the definition and understanding it consistently. That's that's solving the problem of data governance, where I think posting policies and holding people that doesn't even sound like fun to me so I don't. I don't think it sounds fun to anyone. I don't think I'm your girl in that case but. But within that, but within that consistency and solving and confidence you've got a team of people that are that are efficiently and expeditiously delivering quality data assets that you can count on and they're proud of themselves they're doing the work they're producing their customers are happy with what they're looking at it's just, you know, it's like transformative. And it sounds based on your previous example that that saves the company money. It absolutely does and that's one of the conversations that I continue to hone getting pretty good at it. I think it's going to grow, because there is a large portion of the audience that thinks that data governance is an expense and so I think it was Laura Madison that told me when you set a rocket off to the moon. The first, the first payload is the largest amount of fuel. It's that first girl. So you've got to be able to get that first payload. You're an expense yes, it's kind of like putting a solar panels on your house yeah the solar panels aren't cheap but boy do they pay off. Make sense. So, Theresa if somebody wanted to reach out to you and solicit your services how do they get in touch with you. And that can be found on LinkedIn. Also, Acura Business Services, ACC, you are a business services and, you know, call call Shannon and Natalie. Indeed. Go to your local day diversity event. See if I'm talking. Well, Theresa, this has been a fantastic as always. I love your passion around this topic. It always comes. And passion is so important for these things so. So, again, thank you for taking the time to chat with us today. And for all of our listeners out there if you'd like to keep up on the latest podcasts and in the latest in data management education me go to dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. Thank you for listening to Dataversity Talks brought to you by Dataversity. Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and information about our free educational articles, blogs and webinars at dataversity.net forward slash subscribe.