 And here we go. Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of Data Diversity. We would like to thank you for joining the current installment of the Monthly Data Diversity Webinar Series, Real-World Data Governance with Bob Siner. Today, Bob will be discussing how can everyone be a data steward, sponsored today by Elation. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, he will be muted during the webinar. If you'd like to chat with us or with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so. And just to note, Zoom defaults the chat to send to just the panelists, but you may absolutely switch that to chat with everyone. For questions, we will be collecting them by the Q&A section. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights to questions by Twitter using hashtag RWDG. And to find the chat and the Q&A panels, you may click those icons in the bottom middle of your screen to activate those features. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days, containing links to the slides, the recording of the session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now, let me turn it over to John for a brief word from our sponsor, Elation. John, hello and welcome. Hello, Shannon. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And thank you to everyone who's joined the webinar. We are, as always, extremely excited to sponsor Bob and hear more from him on the topic of data governance and stewardship. As many of you know, he's been one of the leading thinkers in the industry for decades now. And so, again, we're just thrilled that you're here. Appreciate you spending the time and feel very privileged to be able to sponsor Bob in this session today. I'm not going to do a classic commercial for Elation. I think all of you either know us or you can easily find us at elation.com. Those of you that do know us know that we're a leader in data governance and a leader in data cataloging. What I really want to touch on is hopefully additive and leading into Bob's session, which is just reaffirming that we see data stewardship and stewards as being more relevant than ever. And I want to share three different things that we're thinking about and we're working on, which I think substantiate that point. So one of the things that we see happening in the market is kind of a revitalization of the idea of marketplaces. And I say real revitalization because you know, marketplaces in terms of data marketplaces specifically have been around in the past, but I think they're taking on new meaning and new depth in this day and age. And we see marketplaces emerging both for the external and internal exchange of data. And so the question is, as these pictures sort of depict, is who's the essentially the shopkeeper for these marketplaces and what kind of marketplace are you going to have and how organized it's going to be and how trustworthy and confident can you be in the merchandise that's in the marketplace. And so again, I think that's directly relevant to this topic that Bob's going to be speaking about today. So we're thinking and working a lot on marketplaces and we essentially see a marketplace as a view on top of a catalog of view for the consumers to interact with. And I'll sort of tease you with that thought and idea and move to the next point. The second thing that we're thinking a lot about and looking at a really materials or corollaries to what we think about is adoption and usage when it comes to stewards and things like curation of metadata. And so we're looking to adjacent industries, adjacent segments in the marketplace to see what learning has gone on there and what we can can take away from that learning and apply in our world. So something that I've been really focused on lately is this knowledge centered services. And this is an organization with this knowledge centered services discipline, it's been around for 20 something years and I almost embarrassed to say I'm recently became aware of it. So in the services world, they have this idea of taking all the flow of information, the flow of tickets that come through services and trying to decide when do they convert that into articles, into knowledge that this leverage and reuse by obviously a much larger audience. And I think there's a lot of exciting corollaries to what we do and to what stewardship do. And Bob's going to talk about sort of operational stewards and tactical stewards and business stewards, types of stewards. And I think, I think, again, there's really some lessons we can learn about how to identify knowledge, how to capture that knowledge, how to motivate people to participate more than just consume. And so I would encourage you, I have the link here on the slide to go out and explore this for yourself and maybe think about some of those things yourself. The third area and the last one that I'll leave you with now, I'll get off the stage and turn over to Bob that I think validates the need more than ever before for stewardship is really this really hot topic, as I'm sure many of you know, which is data mesh and the production of data products as a result of the data mesh. One of the big concepts being that you're going to have this federated publication, documentation management, and hopefully compliant use of data products that are created by business functions, independent domains. And so, wow, you think about that. That's really an exciting concept, but it's just packed full of challenges. One of the challenges is how do you achieve all that? How do you achieve compliance? How do you achieve people doing the right things and following the right policies, having the right things curated, just having quality in general? So I think all of that screams for the need for stewardship more than ever before. So again, this image is Martin Fowler's part of ThoughtWorks who are kind of the leading thinkers around data mesh. So I invite you to go off and do some of your own research on that if you haven't already. So those are just three of the areas that we're thinking about, we're working on that we're really excited about. And we think, as I said before, really make this a super, super relevant topic. So again, thrilled to have you here. Thank you for joining. We appreciate you spending the time. We're thrilled to have Bob here to share with us his knowledge, his experience. So Bob, without any further ado, over to you. John, thank you so much. And thanks to Elation again for sponsoring today's webinar and helping to make this webinar happen. And if you have any questions for John or for Elation, feel free to submit them in the Q&A panel as John will likewise be joining us for the Q&A portion of the webinar at the end. Now, I'm going to introduce to you our speaker for the series, Bob Siner. Bob is the president and principal of KIK Consulting Educational Services and the publisher of the data administration newsletter, T-Dan.com. Bob specializes in non-invasive data governance, data stewardship and metadata management solutions. And with that, I'll give the floor to Bob to start his presentation. Hello and welcome. Thank you, Shannon. Thank you, John. I appreciate your sponsorship of the webinar. Always good to have you here. And I really like the things that you were saying. It really emphasizes the need to govern the activities of people within the organization. And most often, those people that are involved in the governance of data are the stewards. The one thing that I would say is that with this title for this webinar, instead of how can everybody be a data steward, I choose to read it a little bit differently. I say, how can everybody be a data steward? And in fact, I've had people say to me before, if everybody is a data steward, then nobody is a data steward. And I'm sorry, I just outright disagree with that comment. Because in order to, and I think I will be definitely talking about this a little bit more in the session today, without everybody who has a relationship to the data being held formally accountable for what they're doing with the data, you can govern a portion of your organization. You just can't govern the entire organization. So typically, in organizations that embrace the concept of the fact that potentially everybody in the organization is a data steward, it's going to change the way that we're going to put our program into place. And it's going to have more value to the organization by recognizing the fact that potentially everybody that has a relationship to the data is going to be involved in governing the data for the entire organization. So before I jump into the slides that I want to talk about today, I want to just share a couple of the quick activities that I'm involved in. As you know, we've had the, this is the 11th year that we're doing this webinar series on diversity. And first of all, I want to backtrack and I want to just want to say happy new year to everybody who's joining us today. First opportunity to talk to you this year, but this is the 11th year. And so we've been doing this as a monthly webinar on the third Thursday of every month. Next month, we're going to talk about activating your data governance program by using a data catalog. And also, I talk a lot about a concept of noninvasive data governance. Just wanted to make you aware of the book noninvasive data governance that is available at your favorite booksellers. I'll be speaking at a couple of events, one that's coming up next week. In fact, I'll be speaking a couple of times at the enterprise data governance online event. So if you haven't registered for that, please register for that. And I'll be doing a session on stewardship and governance and participating on a panel at that event. And then in San Diego, in March, I will be in San Diego speaking at Enterprise Data World. So hopefully, you'll get the opportunity to join us at one or both of those events. I also provide a couple of different learning plans through the Data Diversity Training Center. The first one I did was called noninvasive data governance, one of my favorite subjects. And then I also did one on noninvasive metadata governance, because as I've been known to say quite often, if you're going to manage your data and govern your data, you're going to need metadata and the metadata will not govern itself. So you need to have governance around your metadata as well. And then the most recent learning plan is titled business glossaries, data dictionaries, and data catalogs. So if you're interested in any of those learning plans, please go visit the Data Diversity Training Center. Shannon mentioned the data administration newsletter, tdan.com, which is in its 26th year of publication. So please go out and visit that website if you're not familiar with it. It's free to view and it's updated twice a month. In fact, the most recent issue went out yesterday. So then my consulting business is KIK, Consulting and Educational Services, where KIK stands for Knowledge is Kings King. And that is the home of noninvasive data governance. And most recently, I've become an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University right here in my hometown of Pittsburgh in the Heinz College postgraduate chief data officer program. So I'm pretty heavily invested in this data space and specifically around data governance. But what are we here to talk about today? I want to answer the question for you of how can everybody be a data steward? And what does it take to recognize who the stewards are and to get them actively engaged? So I'm going to talk about different levels of stewards and different roles of stewards. And John alluded to the operation on the tactical stewards. I'm going to talk about something that really goes into my definition of stewardship, which is formalized accountability. So if you use sensitive data and you're being held formally accountable for how you protect sensitive data, you're a data steward, you can't opt in or opt out of it. We'll spend a little bit of time talking about what it means to formalize accountability. We'll talk about how to handle the complexity of having everybody in the organization being a data steward. We'll talk about the complete coverage that is actually deployed by this approach. And I mentioned that a little bit earlier. Instead of just identifying or assigning a handful of stewards, if we take into consideration the potential that everybody's a data steward, that's really the only true way to cover the entire organization. And then as I've always said, everybody is a data steward to get over it. So I'm going to spend the last couple of minutes talking about how to get over that idea that everybody is a data steward. Before I get started in that, even I want to just share with you the definitions that I share often in these webinars and all three of the top definitions that are on your screen right now, they all end in the management of data and data related assets because we know we're not just managing the data. There's assets, there's resources, there's metadata that's associated with that data. I word the definition of data governance quite strongly. I say that data governance is the execution and enforcement of authority over the management of data and data related assets. And then stewardship as I alluded to before, it's the formalization of accountability for the management of data and data related assets. And then metadata that needs to be governed itself is data that's stored somewhere within the organization, typically in an IT tool that improves both the business and the technical understanding of the management of data and data related assets. And in fact, what I want to kind of add to that is, well, what is a data steward? Who is the data steward? And in my definition, a data steward is basically a person that has a relationship to data that is being held formally accountable for what they do with the data. And when it comes to the management of data, I typically for simplicity's sakes, break it down into three actions that people can take with data. They can define it, they can produce it, they can use it pretty much everything else falls under one of those three. So you might hear me refer to the definition production and usage of data throughout the webinar today. So the first thing I want to talk about is I want to define the levels and the different roles of data stewards just so you get an idea of the fact that there's not just one kind of carte blanche data steward for the organization. We'll talk about the roles and I'll provide to you a framework that you can use to determine what levels of stewardship are going to be required within your organization. I'll talk about that tactical data steward role. I'll talk about that operational data steward role. And something that I hear referred to in a lot of the organizations that I work with are the fact that you have business and you have technical data stewards. So let's talk about these things. The first thing is when you're setting up roles and responsibilities associated with your governance program, there's a bunch of different levels that you need to take into consideration. There's the executive level, a strategic level oftentimes filled with a data governance council or a data governance committee, then there's the tactical level of stewards, the operational level of stewards, and then there's the support level of roles and responsibilities. So when we look at those two levels that are now highlighted in blue, we've got tactical data stewards who are typically people that are subject matter experts and I oftentimes refer to them as data domain stewards. They have responsibility or accountability for how a specific subject area of data is used across the organization instead of just specifically within a single business unit. And if we're going to break down the silos of data within the organizations, we know that we need to have clear decision makers around certain subject matters of data. So there's the tactical data stewards, the data domain stewards, and then there's the role that everybody plays. Everybody in the organization most likely defines and or produces and or uses data as part of their job. And if they're going to be held formally accountable for how they define the data, for the definition that they put to the data, for how they produce the data, and certainly how they use the data, then people are stewards. And we need to help them to recognize themselves as being data stewards before we can even engage them as data stewards. And so we're not going to go around tagging them all on the shoulder and saying, Hey, you're a data steward, start doing data stewards stuff. Now it takes it takes a resolute effort to take somebody focusing on helping those stewards to recognize themselves as stewards and to play the role appropriately of the data stewards. So I've done complete webinars on this diagram. I've done complete workshops at some of the the diversity events that I talked about earlier. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through this model. But first thing I want to point out is that there's a lot of different moving components to a successful data governance program. There's an executive executive level and in this in this example, it talks about people being on a data and analytics steering committee, you might just have a data governance steering committee, but they're not involved day to day in the activities of governing data. But it's really important that they support sponsor and understand what you're doing when it comes to data governance. In fact, that's the number one best practice in 100% of my clients is that if we got to get our senior level to support sponsor and understand what we're doing, there's the strategic level, which is typically a data governance council or something named similar to that. And then there's the tactical and the operational levels. And that's where a lot of the work gets done. And so you'll see that, you know, I have the data subject matter experts that I referred to as data domain stewards at the tactical level, then there's the operational data stewards, the people that day to day are defining, producing, using the data of the organization. And then if we go to the left hand side of the diagram, typically when we put together a group of people or a team of people to focus on resolving a data issue or addressing a data opportunity, they're made up of the stewards, they're made up of the subject matter experts, they're made up of the day-to-day stewards. So that's why you see the working teams cutting into the tactical and operational level. And then there's the data governance manager or data governance administrator. And then there's all the different parts of the organization that are already governing. They may not be governing data, but there's IT, which is governing your information technology, security that's governing security, legal audit, human resources, risk management, whoever in your organization is already governing. Instead of us trying to do what they do or them trying to do what we do, I suggest that they would be partners of your data governance program. So several years ago, I put together this framework for a data governance program and you'll see down the left hand side of the framework. And here I'll highlight it for you. Again, we've got the executive, the strategic, the tactical, the operational, and the support levels of the organization. And I'd like to cross-reference those with what I consider to be the six core components of a successful governance program. And that is the data itself, the roles, the processes, communications, metrics, and tools. But if we fill in that matrix, fill in the framework, and we go specifically down the roles column, you can see at the executive level, we've got a data and analytics steering committee or some type of steering committee, we've got a council at the strategic level, the subject matter experts at the operational level, and then the partners, the working teams, the administrator of the program itself at the support level. So just to start out, it makes sense to understand what roles need to be a part of your program and the data stewards play a critical role in the successful implementation of a data governance program. So using that pyramid diagram that I just shared with you, let's spend a minute talking about the tactical level of data steward. And oftentimes, in fact, I had a client recently that I referred to these folks as data domain stewards. And their response to me was, well, those are really the subject matter experts for the data. They're the people that we go to when we've got a question about that data. And I said, yeah, that's what they are. They're basically those subject matter experts. And they said, okay, well, that's what we're going to call them. So don't feel like you need to call them data domain stewards. They could be the subject matter experts, the people that we go to when we've got a question about the data or we need a decision to be made about that data. And the one thing that I kind of shy away from, and a lot of organizations use this term, is they refer to people as being data owners. And by calling people data owners, I'm not telling you not to do that. But I'm just suggesting that using the term data owner implies exactly the wrong thing. I mean, the organization owns the data. If you look up the definition of what a steward is in the dictionary, it basically states that it's somebody that takes care of something for somebody else. And that and so the data is owned by the organization, a steward is somebody who takes care of the data for their business unit for the organization. And typically at the tactical level, these are people that are accountable for looking at the data as a cross business unit resource. And sometimes these people have the authority to be able to make decisions or at least escalate decisions up to the council level. If you look at the pyramid diagram there along the right hand side, there's an escalation arrow that goes from operational, if it's just a business area specific problem to the cross business area, all the way up to the council at the strategic level. Typically, you don't see that that escalation arrow extended up into the executive level, because that's why you have a council, let them resolve issues that can't be resolved at this tactical level of stewardship. So I will tell you this that organizations that are implementing governance programs, this tactical level of steward, who is looking at data across the different business areas, they're an integral role in the in the successful implementation of a data governance program, because if you only have people at the operational level, the chances are that you're going to do less work in breaking down those silos. But those not only is it an integral role, but oftentimes it's the most important in the most difficult role to fill when you're building out your program. So start by defining your domains, your subject areas of data, figure out who you already go to. You know, potentially they would be your tactical data steward role within your organization, and you're going to have multiple of them. In fact, you're going to have at least one for each one of the subject areas. Maybe you'll have some sub domain stewards and such as well, but they play that integral role. They're the ones that are there to to make decisions or escalate things up to the council so that decisions are made. Let's talk about the operational level stewards as well. And these are people within the organization, potentially everybody in the organization who are defining data as part of their job or producing data or using data as part of their job. And so, you know, basically, if you think about those as the actions that people can take with data, everybody does at least one of these actions or at least most people do. And if they're being held formally accountable for taking those actions. So like, for example, if they're held formally accountable for how they're defining data, they're not going to use what I oftentimes refer to as cheeseburger definitions. Well, what's the definition of a cheeseburger? It's a burger with cheese, a student account number. It's an account number for a student. You know, if we want better definitions, then we need to work with the people that are defining the data to put better definitions into place. So they're being held formally accountable for defining the data, people that will be held formally accountable for producing the data. And certainly the one that's really a no brainer is people need to be held formally accountable for how they use the data. Certainly the compliance and the privacy rules dictate that anybody that uses data that's sensitive has to know the rules and needs to follow, follow suit with the appropriate actions and the appropriate handling for the data that they use, all depending on depending on its classification and the handling rules that are associated with that classification. So the operational data stewards data is already a part of their everyday job. If we can get them to the point where they recognize themselves as data stewards, that's a big win for your program. I mean, if they know that that what they do with the data matters and you can help them to understand that what they do with the data matters, you know, if they recognize themselves as data stewards, it's a lot less invasive to label them as data stewards. It's not their role. It's not their title. It's their role in terms of data governance, but we want people to recognize themselves as stewards. And the fact is that people at all levels within this pyramid diagram, they're stewards of the data. We need to help them to recognize that they're stewards and help them to steward the data more appropriately. And again, next thing I'm going to want to talk about is holding them formally accountable. That's a very important aspect. And that's really where governance as a scary word comes into play is to get people to be held formally accountable for what they do with the data. The last thing I want to talk about in terms of defining the levels and the roles of the data stewards is a lot of organizations refer to these people as business stewards or technical data stewards. And that's fine. If that works for your organization, I'm not here to tell you to change that. I agree with the concept, but we also need to know that people, there's different levels of the stewards. There's people that are looking at data as a cross business unit asset, and there's people that are looking at data as an asset specifically to their business unit. And there's a lot of other names that are given to stewards, chief stewards, system stewards, process stewards. Sorry about that. Thought that was turned off. Risk stewards. In fact, I had a conversation with a client earlier today where they were talking about data creators stewards and data curators stewards, data insights stewards, data consumer stewards. That's fine. Call them whatever you feel is appropriate to call them in your organization, but also recognize that they're mostly playing that operational level. And if they're a decision maker that's looking at data across business units, they would be considered at the tactical level. They'd be a data domain steward, or potentially a data subject area steward, or whatever you refer to them as. So we talk about the different levels of stewards. I want to also focus on the term formalizing accountability and what that means. And so the things that I want to talk about in terms of formalizing accountability are how accountability really ties to a commitment to produce results in the organization. That the accountability is really based on people's relationship to the data. Just like I said, if you use sensitive information, we're not going to tell 50% of the people who use sensitive information to protect that data, but the other 50%, no, you can go and do whatever you want with it. So no, you become a steward based on your relationship to the data. And it's not something that typically you can opt in or opt out of within the organization. We just need to move from a level of informality to a level of formality when we're implementing our governance and our stewardship programs. So accountability ties commitment to results. Accountability for data is really what data governance is all about. And in fact, I wrote a series of articles years ago in my publication in the TDAN publication about the stewardship approach to data governance. So we need to make certain that people understand that the only way that we're going to we're going to successfully govern our data is to apply that level of accountability. And that's one thing I hear from a lot of the senior leaders that I talked to in organizations is that they say, we're seriously lacking accountability. Well, you can apply accountability through the way that you recognize people as stewards and getting them engaged as stewards. So we want to get them to obliged and what we get them willing to accept the responsibilities for the things that they do. The easiest example comes again back to, you know, using data that needs to be protected and that's sensitive information or defining data the way it's that a way that the people in the business areas will understand the data producing the data holding people accountable for how they're producing the data as well. And like I said, in a lot of the organizations that I work with, I hear that a lack of accountability is something that many organizations have and that they need to formalize that. In fact, the whole concept of everybody being a data steward and the idea of formalizing people's relationship to the data or formalizing their accountability for the relationship is a core tenant of data governance. Just wanted to kind of throw in a few quotables of things that I found recently. I don't want to read them verbatim, but, you know, the glue that ties commitment to results. It's essential to instead of maybe the health of our nation, but having formal stewardship is essential to the health of your organization. Accountability breeds responsibility is one of the things that Stephen Covey is known for saying. So, you know, we want to talk about what is it going to take to formalize people's accountability for data. So we want to do that basically based on their relationship to the data. So we understand that people define data, people produce data, people use data as part of their job. That basically describes everybody. So now you're getting a little bit of a feeling as to how everybody can be a data steward. The administrators need to make certain that they know who in the organization is defining the data and producing and using the data. Oftentimes, the data catalog tools like the elation tool as an example are a perfect place to store information about who does what with data. So the administrators need to inventory who does what with the data. The data catalog is a perfect place for you to record who the stewards are. Record the data that they have a relationship to help to get them engaged in processes that are focused on resolving issues or focused on addressing opportunities to improve around the data. So that's really what it means. Based on the relationship to data, if we're going to hold you accountable for what you do with the data, then you're a data steward. And I think that most senior leadership in most organizations would agree that it makes sense to look to see what people are doing with data and help them to do it better. Again, taking a less invasive approach, you assign people to be data stewards. It immediately feels like it's over and above what they're presently doing. So the other thing I want to say about the formalized accountability is that being a data steward is not optional. Everybody that uses data must be accountable. If we're going to cover the entire organization with stewardship, then everybody that uses the data must be accountable for how they use the data. Again, we're not going to go to 50% and say protect the data. The other 50 do whatever you want with the data. And we need to say the same thing about those people that define and that produce the data. It really depends on getting everybody engaged in the organization to recognize themselves as playing a role with the data to recognize themselves as stewards in order to completely cover the organization. So it requires getting people to care. And so you can certainly have conversations with them about what they can't do and what they would do with the data and help them to understand that data governance can help them to do things that perhaps, I mean, right now they can't do or get them to care about, what could we do if we actually had the data and had the confidence and the data to do it? And so taking this approach requires getting management to want to execute and enforce authority across the organization. The most important piece of this slide is it's data being a data steward is not something that you need to assign to people. In fact, I suggest again, the exact opposite, let's recognize who the people are and help them to govern and steward the data better. So how can we move from being informal to being informal? We can write it into people's job descriptions. It can become the basis of performance evaluation. You can certainly have incentives for people to steward the data appropriately or incentives for people to learn more about the role that they play in the quality and the value of the data. And instead of calling everything a governance process, my suggestion is that we apply governance and we apply stewardship to the process. And that's again, that's something that I call out as being one of the core ideas of non-invasive data governance is every process that you have is a governance process. Let's apply governance to it. Let's apply what I oftentimes refer to as the data governance bill of rights, getting the right people involved at the right time with the right data for the right reason. That's why I have the word rights in quote. So we're getting people to do the right thing, but they need to understand that they play a role in how they govern, how the data is governed in the organization. We're not handing it to them as something that's brand new. It's part of their responsibility already. All right. Now we want to talk about how to handle the complexity of having everybody in the organization being a data steward. Instead of those five people over there in the corner who you refer to as data stewards, let's take a look at what does it mean for the just in terms of the complexity of implementing a stewardship level of accountability when you're implementing governance. So I want to talk about the support sponsorship and understanding that's necessary, organizational communications, all of these things. Let me just kind of walk through these things quickly with you. So the first thing is the support sponsorship and understanding of the role data governance plays in a successful data centric, data managed, data driven decision making organization. And I'd be lying to you if I said that this is the number one best practice in 98% of my clients because it's 100%. They tell me that if they don't have senior leadership support, sponsorship and understanding, then our program is going to be at risk. One of the things that goes along with probably the most important of those three words is the understanding, is the fact that people need to, first of all, leaders need to understand that potentially everybody in the organization who has a relationship to the data that's being accountable is a steward. We're not going to change their titles, but they need to understand that in order to really understand how governance is going to operate in your organization. And if at some point your senior leadership don't support sponsor understand, your program is going to be at risk immediately. So you may have a policy that states that everybody is a steward. Ideally what we want to do is we want to get people in the organization to recognize themselves as data stewards. And that takes the socialization of the topic of stewardship and how you're defining stewardship within your organization. So it comes down to communications, communications, communications, and then when you're done communicating, communicate some more. Get these people in the organization that have a relationship to data to recognize themselves as data stewards and look for the help that they need to define the data in a way it's going to be more useful to the organization, produce appropriate data and to use data appropriately within the organization. So plan for effective communications. I typically suggest in the organization that you communicate with everybody that's a data steward and that could be everybody in the organization what it means to be a data steward and how we've even recognized them as data stewards so they can recognize themselves. When I define a communication plan for an organization for data governance, I focus on the three O's of communications. Let's orient people to the concepts, let's onboard them when we're asking them to do something and then there's ongoing communication. And when you're building out a communication plan, the most important thing that you can do is to focus your communication on specifically the audiences that you're talking to and deliver as part of your plan. What's the message we want to get across? What's the cadence? What instruments are we going to use? What resources need to be in place to help us to deliver the communications? All of those things go into an effective communication plan. And instead of following a big bang approach to data governance or as I mentioned to another client recently, you're not going to flip a switch and have governance come on for your organization. Typically you're going to do it incrementally. So you're going to start with a part of the organization, help them to recognize or recognize with them who the stewards are and understand that this is not going to be a revolution to your organization. You're going to do it as an evolution. You may start with a slice of the pie or a slice of a slice of the pie and then expand to a full part of the organization and then another part of the organization and you're going to learn from every time that you do it. What was successful? How well were we able to get the stewards to recognize themselves as stewards? And let's learn from that so we do it more effectively with the next group that we're talking to. I talked about building it into people's job descriptions and that's a little bit more invasive, but it may be necessary in your organization just to have a statement in everybody's job description that says that they have a responsibility to the organization for how they define, they produce and how they use the data. So it could be accountable, we could state in their job description that they're accountable for how they define, produce and use data. They're accountable for participating in education and awareness around governance and stewardship. Build it into their performance evaluation, give them incentive to want to play the role of the steward and that's going to help people to start to recognize themselves as playing a key role in the implementation of a successful governance program. So now I just want to kind of switch gears a little bit and talk about the complete coverage that I spoke about. In fact, if you only assign a certain number of people in your organization to be stewards, it's going to be a pretty huge step to get the governance accepted across the organization. So we're going to do governance through stewardship. I want to talk to something that I hear people refer to as people governance. Maybe we shouldn't call it data governance, call it people governance. And this basically includes everybody in the organization if our goal is to become data driven and data centric. Some of the statements, if you've attended my webinars in the past, I talk about the fact that data will not govern itself. And I mentioned earlier the metadata will not govern itself. In order to govern the data and to govern the metadata, it requires that we activate these people who have a relationship to the data and that are being held accountable for that data. It requires the activation of the data stewards and the words that we use matter. So if you go around saying you're assigning people to be data stewards, the first thing that they're going to think is, and I know this is the way I feel when somebody assigns me something, is that I feel like it's over and above what I'm presently doing. So I suggest that we kind of cross out the word assign. And the word recognize has a positive meaning to it, a positive connotation. So if we recognize people as stewards, it's a lot more positive than if somebody's being assigned something immediately feels like it's over and above what they're doing. Again, try to stay as non-invasive or as least invasive as you can as you're starting to implement governance within your organization. And I mentioned earlier, if you go out to the TDAN publication and you look up the stewardship approach to data governance, there's a series of 10 articles that I actually wrote before I wrote the book of non-invasive data governance that I used as kind of the basis for the book. So please go out to TDAN and check out those articles. Many of you within the dataversity community may be familiar with a good friend of mine, Len Silverstone. He writes a column for TDAN. He speaks at a lot of dataversity events. He's the Zen with Len guy, but he once told me that we shouldn't even call this data governance. We should call it people governance because it's people behavior that must be governed and that the data will do what we tell it to do. And so he was the one that first came to me with the whole concept of, well, maybe we should call this people governance instead of data governance. And I started to look up information on people governance. And I just wanted to share with you some of the core principles of people governance that if you go and do a search on the internet, you might find this foundation that I located and said, this is what we need to focus on if we are actually implementing the governance of people across the organization. Focus on their practices, raise their awareness, underscore the initiatives and the things that they're doing and how they're going to help the organization to become more efficient and effective and become more data centric and lead to data driven decision making. If you really focus on the concept of people governance, you can develop that common understanding of what governance is and the value that will come from implementing governance. Again, so something to think about, maybe it should be called data governance. Maybe we've been calling it the wrong thing all along. Maybe we should refer to it as people governance. And it's all the business units and all the technology units. Certainly, if you have formal governance in place for just a percentage of the organization, that's good, but you really want to cover the entire organization and you're not going to do it all at once. So incrementally, start getting people to recognize their themselves as stewards, recognize the people who are the subject matter experts, the tactical level stewards. It builds a little bit of complexity into your program, but the fact is that if you implement governance this way, if everybody is considered to be a data steward, you're really going to have a much more effective level of governance across the organization. When the auditors come in and say, you're not protecting the data the way you need to, they're not going to just tell you, hey, these three few business areas over here, get them to protect the data, but the rest of the people, they don't need to protect the data. Now they're going to tell you everybody must do it. So yeah, it builds complexity. It maybe makes a little bit more work for the people that are implementing governance programs, but at the end of the day, it's going to cover your organization in its entirety instead of those few people that are data stewards. So I said it before, deploy this thing incrementally, learn from doing it. And as I mentioned earlier, I wrote an article on TDAN years ago called everybody is a data steward, get over it. And if we can get our organization to understand that everybody potentially is a data steward, we're going to be a lot more successful. So we want to become data driven and data centric organizations. Progresses in an organization is oftentimes an activity compelled by data driven and data centric organizations are those organizations that want to be data driven and data centric, are those organizations that are focusing more on successful governance of the data. And oftentimes they're looking at everybody potentially being a data steward instead of just a handful of people being data stewards. So how are we going to get over the last thing I want to talk about before I turn this back over to Shannon for the Q&A and bring John back into the conversation, because I want to share with you my rules for becoming a data steward. And these were in an article that I wrote on TDAN back in 2013. We'll talk about quickly data governance approaches, the role of communications on boarding everybody, and then we'll turn it over to the Q&A. So I have eight rules that I want to share with you about becoming a data steward. The first one is a data steward can be absolutely anybody, or even if you strike out the word anybody and say it can be absolutely everybody in the organization, if they have a relationship to the data and they're being held formally accountable for it, they are a steward. Being a data steward describes a relationship to the data. It's not a position. So I know there are many organizations, maybe many of you out there that have people who have the title of data steward. Well, if you use sensitive information and you're not a data steward and you're not titled a data steward, you still have to protect that information. So being a steward, like I said, describes a relationship to the data and it's not a position. Typically data stewards are not hired to be data stewards. They're being hired to do the job that is in their job description that is in their title. But just by the mere fact that they have a relationship to the data, if they're being held accountable for that relationship, they are a data steward. And like I said before, a steward doesn't have to have the title of data steward in order to effectively be a steward within the organization. My rules five through eight for becoming a data steward is a data steward does not have to be told how to do their job. They may need to be told what their relationship to the data means and how they should handle their relationship to the data. For example, if they use sensitive information, they may need to encrypt it before they transmit it. They may need to send it to a printer with a select code that says that it won't print until I get over to that printer and enter in my code to get my data. They don't have to be told how to do their job. They may need to be told what it means to be a steward of the data and how that impacts them in their job. I oftentimes suggest that public or industry certification of stewards in my term analogy is a load of bunk because again, stewards have a job to do within the organization. Stewarding the data is only part of that job. They have a day job, so to speak, but they're a steward based on the fact that they have a relationship to the data and they're being held formally accountable for that relationship. And another rule of being a data steward is there is more than one data steward for each type of data. So if you have one steward for a type of data, understand that all those people that use that data, they're also stewards of the data. All the people that define the data in all the different ways that it's defined, they're stewards of the data. There is way more than just one data steward for each type of data in your organization. And that's a problem I see with some organizations. We have a product data steward and they're going to do everything with that. We have a customer data steward. Well, the fact is that yeah, they're the tactical level stewards. Maybe they're the decision makers, but potentially everybody in the organization is a steward. And if you're going to train your data stewards, that training should be focused on formalizing the accountability for the actions that they already take with the data. So real quickly, and again, I've given full presentations on this subject of this slide is that there's several approaches to data governance. There's a command and control. Thou shalt do this approach, very top down driven. There's the traditional approach which is like the movie Field of Dreams. The statement from that movie is if you build it, they will come. Well, in a traditional approach, people build a program and they hope that people will gravitate toward it. In the noninvasive approach, it starts with the premise of we're already governing data. We're just not doing it as formally as we need to, and we're going to apply some formality to it. And data stewardship, the subject of today's webinar is required no matter what approach you take. And so I want to share with you another just a quick graphic here that compares and contrasts those three approaches to data governance in terms of each of those core components that I spoke about. And if you look at the roles row of that matrix, the difference in the command and control approaches were assigning stewards and the traditional approach, yeah, we're identifying people who should be stewards in the noninvasive approach. We're recognizing people and we're formalizing the approach. And look at the communication row of this matrix as well. Instead of saying you will do this or you should do this, let's start with a premise of you're already doing this. So let's help you to do it better. It's not going to interfere with what you're doing, at least to not a great extent. So again, this type of comparison between the approaches is really, really important. And we want to get people to do the right thing. We want them to follow that Bill of Rights. And again, we're right to being in quotes. So I hope this gives you an idea as to how we can compare and contrast those different components based on the approach that we're taking. I talked about a lot about communications. And I just want to reemphasize that that a communication plan is pivotal, pivotal to the success of your program. And that means we need to communicate with the operational level, also with the tactical level, also with the strategic and the executive levels and support levels of your organization. But it's going to be very difficult to go from an ungoverned environment to a government environment, if we don't have an effective communication plan in place. And I oftentimes suggest it as being one of the four standard artifacts that you should complete when you're standing up a program, should do an assessment, a critical analysis that leads into a roadmap or an action plan, which is number two, the roles and responsibilities, the detail of that operating model is number three, and then having a communication plan. Those are kind of the four standard artifacts that most organizations need when they're standing up the program. Getting people involved requires effective communications, so it engages the people in your organization who are the communication specialists to get your messaging right and plan for those three O's of communication that I talked about, the orientation, the onboarding, and the ongoing communication. So if we're going to onboard everybody in the organization as data steward, it requires a strong communication plan. It requires a determined and unwavering, I oftentimes refer to it as a resolute effort to implement governance. It's not going to happen on its own. It becomes a, you know, being able to onboard people, that becomes a metric. How many people have been onboarded? How many people have learned about the program? And how often do we provide this communications to people? We need to repeat it periodically because people learn from hearing things again and again and use it to evaluate the effectiveness of the messaging and the effectiveness of people recognizing themselves as data stewards. So the last word is how to get everybody to get over the fact that everybody is a data steward. We need to apply the rules equally to everybody that encounters the data, defines, produces, and uses it. Everybody must know and live by the rules. Rules must be formally enforced, and we must have the ability to demonstrate to people that we have a way of auditing and making certain that the rules are being followed. Everybody in the organization is a steward. We need to get past that fact, and we need to implement our programs in a way that effectively commits to that fact. So in this webinar, I talked about the different levels of stewards, what it means to formally hold people accountable, how this covers the entire organization instead of just a piece of the organization, how that full coverage of the organization is necessary, and how we can get over the concept that everybody in the organization is a steward of the data. And with that, I'm going to turn it back to Shannon, see if we have any questions today, and thank you very much for sitting through this webinar. We have lots of questions coming in. Thank you, Bob, and just to answer the most commonly asked question is just a reminder. I was going to follow up email by end of day Monday for this webinar, links to the slides and reporting. And so I'm just going to dive in here and keep the questions coming. Any questions we don't have time to get to, I'll get over to Bob to include also in that follow-up email. So if, and I'll open this up to both of you, if data steward is accountable for the data management, do we really need a data owner? I'll answer that first. And then, John, feel free to take a stab at it as well. I don't like the title of data owner or the role of the data owner because it implies that it's their data and they can do with it what they want. I say we don't necessarily, we can replace the data owner with the data steward. And that could be at the tactical level, that could be at the operational level. Still many organizations use that term. That's fine because people understand what they, what you're trying to get across, but they're not really owners. So I say, you know, let's move away from that. Yeah, totally agree with Bob. That term owner, and I saw some of the chat during your presentation, Bob, the others were agreeing that term. And someone said that they assigned the term own to the organization, which, which I like a lot because, you know, it, this is part of a big topic of decision rights in the US. As soon as you start calling someone an owner, it's, it's a loaded term and it, it spends people off in different directions about what they're not responsible for and what they are responsible for. So totally agree with you, Bob. And the dictionary definition of a steward, like I said before, is somebody that takes care of something for somebody else. I wrote an article years ago that said a baby data steward is like a baby center. You know, when somebody came and babysat my kids when they were little, they didn't own the kids. They were taking care of the kids while we were gone. At least we hope we hope they were. So I think steward is the appropriate term. We want to get people to start using that language instead of owner. I love it. So what has proven over time to be the best way to collect quote unquote operational data steward input and observations to feel to feed into the overall data stewardship and data governance feedback loop. So I think that if you just ask people what data they use, who uses that data? Who's involved in the definition and the production who produces that data and somehow do a survey or a questionnaire or sit down with them and observe who does that. That's the best way to recognize that it could be a lot of people and have a formal way of being able to record who those stewards are. And you know, I'm thinking this is what John may be thinking is that you want to have a place to record that information too. And the data catalog is a perfect place to be able to record that information. I thought I understood the question to be how do you gather input for the operational steward? And so I'm going to answer that one. I think in there was some in the chat, there was some you know, debate going back and forth about the role of tech versus the role of people. And I think governance and stewardship is all about people, right? And I'm the vendor, right? So but I think what we can hope that tech does is to streamline the work process, right? Help us remove the mundane stuff, but optimize and spend time on the on the more difficult problems like term definition, which was mentioned in the chat. So how do we get input for operational stewards? I think, you know, you can set tech loose on that to a certain extent. There's much greater capability to crawl through systems and to give feedback about what's being used, what people care about, what's important, based upon what people touch, you know, the actual data they're consuming. So that would be my answer. I love it. So I'm going to try and slip in one more question here in the last couple of minutes we have. When you have thousands of employees, what are some good strategies to identify how person, how each person defines, produces, and uses data, and then tie that to the actual data. So when you have thousands of employees, and if you base it on the things that I've talked about in this webinar, then thousands of people potentially could be stewards of the data. So, you know, and so what would be a good strategy to identify the people that are defining the data? Well, look at the present activities in the organization and look, you know, data modeling is a form of data definition. People that are doing data integration efforts are defining the data. People that are streamlining or consolidating systems into a single system. You know, there's definition of the data at the source. There's definition of the data at the target. You know, you can just formally observe from those activities who the people are that are defining the data, who are the people that are going to ultimately have the responsibility for producing data or bringing data in from the outside. And you could certainly ask them, who are the users of this data? And I think that's the way that you need to engage these people. You're not just going to automatically know who these people are. Do this by engaging with these different groups and finding out just by observation or by asking them who's responsible for defining the data. Okay, let's work with them to help them to define the data better. Who's producing the data? Well, let's work with them and who's using the data. Let's work with them as well. So you're going to do it a lot through observation and just by asking them. They'll tell you who the people are, who have these relationships to the data. And if you follow what I've been talking about today, potentially these people are data storage. Well, thank you both. Oh, sorry, John. Yeah, and I was just going to add really briefly, I think also, you know, this comes back to a question of leadership and sponsorship. And if it's conveyed the importance of this activity and that the organization needs to collect authoritative information, I think a certain portion of the population will self-identify. So in addition to all the great things Bob said, hopefully you could also get some degree of self-identification as well. Well, thank you both so much for this great presentation and conversation. I'm afraid that is all the time that we have for today though. Again, just a reminder, I will send a follow-up email by end of day Monday to all registrants with links to the slides, links to the recordings, and I'll get a copy of the questions over to Bob so we can get those answers to those questions we didn't have time to get to today as well. Thanks to all of our attendees for being so engaged in everything that we do. I love the chat going on throughout and the questions coming in. I hope you all have a great day and thanks to Alation for helping to make these webinars happen. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody. Thank you.