 Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Executive Editor of Data Diversity. We'd like to thank you for joining this month's installment of the Monthly Data Diversity Webinar Series, CDO Vision. This month, John Maddley and Tony Shaw will discuss Data Governance and the CEO sponsored today by Calibra. Just a couple of points to get us started due to the large number of people that attend these sessions. You will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we'll be collecting them by the Q&A in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag CDO Vision. If you would like to chat with us and with each other, we encourage you to do so as you pull down. Click on the chat icon in the top right corner for that feature. You may do so. And as always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the slides, the recording of this session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me introduce our speakers for today, well-known industry analyst John Lally is a business technology thought leader and recognized authority in all aspects of enterprise information management, with 30 years experience in planning, project management, improving IT organizations, and successful implementation of information systems. As president of IMQ Solutions, he leads the consultancy focused on improving a client's business results through information management and data governance. And moderating today's discussion is Data Diversity Phone CEO Tony Shaw. Tony is, of course, responsible for the business strategy of the company and its subsidiaries, and all of which conduct educational conferences, training, and publishing activities focused on the area of enterprise data management. And with that, I will turn it over to Tony and John to get us started. Hello and welcome. Thank you very much, Shannon. A pleasure to be here with everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome John as well. For those who haven't joined us before, and I'll just mention this because it turns out that this particular topic has brought a number of new people into our circle today. So every month John and I sit down and talk about issues that relate to the business of data management, and in particular the priorities of chief data offices. And so as part of our sort of journey through these topics, we decided that we should really get some perspective on the most senior levels of business as they relate to data management and data governance. And as John's consulting assignments often put him in that position of sort of translating business and technology needs together, then he's had a lot of experience talking to senior executives and chief executives about this particular issue. So John, I know I'm very much looking forward to your presentation today. Why don't we get started? And but just before we do, I'm going to invite folks to submit their questions as we go. We'll probably defer most of them to the end, but if you get in early, then there's a better chance we'll be able to address your question before the end of the hour. So with great pleasure, John Lathley, take it over, John. Thank you very much, Tony, and thank you, everybody. I'm bringing up my PowerPoint now. Someone let me know if it's not visible, otherwise I will continue. No, you're good, John. Okay, well, I know I'm good, but can you see the PowerPoint? There we go. Okay, but thank you. And this is kind of a new topic, a little bit different in talking about CEO and data governance in the same sentence. But as the subtitle says, this isn't really new. We're going to find out by the end of this that this is not a huge leap in any way, a shape or form, and we're talking evolution, not revolution. But to understand the perspective here, we have to also talk about, first of all, how a chief executive officer tends to think. He or she is focused on really only a few things, mostly driven by the board of directors, and that would be, how are you going to get more revenue, and that could be anything from customers to market share, products and services, reduced costs, and that could be costs to the client through better outcomes or efficiency or cycle times. And of course, protect the reputation of the organization, be in compliance and keep liability under control. And that is the board of directors as well as external factors. It's very key that when we start to talk about chief executives and how they're viewing data governance, and they are talking about this now, by the way, but you have to understand their perspective. If you don't understand that perspective, you'll be disappointed. However, you don't want to be disappointed because they have a very strict assignment actually. The other little bit of context before we dive in here is that things are changing as the industry shifts. Tom Redmond came up with a lovely blog or two this month. One of them was in the OCDQ blog, Jim Harris's site. And kind of a qualitative survey that Dr. Redmond did. And that was in 2010, the whole view around data management and formal management of data was really, sorry about that. There we go. Was really based on apathy, nobody cares, data is just, it's there. And of course, those of us in this industry, we've been working on that. But with different view of that for a very long time. In 2015, that is changing. The apathy is going away. Fear is now coming in. Fear of being left behind, fear of being not competitive. But also fear of that this is something new. It's a lot of work. We don't want to tackle this. It's too new. Our executives won't understand it. So it's good news bad news. There is more engagement in data. There's more discussing it. But it's also wrapped around fear. There is a level of excitement, of course, from most of us in the data space has grown to people outside of the space. Now I added a thought to that. And I think when you start to talk about the emotions, I think, and from excited to fearful, in between we're missing this just getting engaged. A few people on the business executive realm were engaged in 2010. Now that is numerous. The fact that we have a web series called Chief Data Officers is a huge indication of that. But everyone is still sorting out what exactly does that mean. And we're going to get a perspective of that. First we're going to talk about why should a CEO care about data, governance, what are the drivers in those competitive pressures in that area. We're going to talk about accountability. That is the CEO's big mantle. The CEO is the ultimate accountable executive in an organization. And what kind of problems, especially by middle management, might we have to confront as we go through this. So let's just talk about how the CEO cares. First of all, on one hand, they don't care at all. It's just something that is being done many levels below the view or the purvey of a chief executive officer. There's things that have to happen to run a business. And if it's happening, don't bother me, all right? If you're going to tell me about it, you've got about 30 seconds to get your message across to a chief executive officer. If they do care about it, if the actual term data governance enters a discussion, they're going to care about it only if it's relevant to their assigned accountability and the fulfillment of their organization strategies. That's it. There is no discussion about data governance because it's a growing thing. There is no discussion about data governance because it's required for regulations. We know that regulatory drivers are important as CEO really doesn't care. All the CEO cares about is are we in compliance? How we get there may be, may be not important to me. It has to be relevant in a particular context. An awful lot of information people have been frustrated over the years because the executives don't care, they're not understanding, and it's a shortcoming on their part. The first takeaway from this thing is it's not a shortcoming. They are doing their job, period, end of discussion. Data governance is no more important to a CEO than IT governance and financial governance, it's all out there. But why data governance? Why might it appear to a chief executive officer? Well, a lot of organizations are moving from data driven. Everyone says we're data driven, we're data driven. And there's a quote down the bottom here by Jim Harris as to really what that means and how the perspective of that has to change. Everybody is data driven now. That's no longer a significant thing to say. It is the fuel of commerce for the 21st century is data and information. But are you thinking about monetizing your data? A lot of CEOs are realizing there is enormous revenue opportunity, where there has never been any consideration of revenue before. And Tony and I have talked about in these series several organizations that have discovered interest in their data from entities that they never thought would be interested in it. Economic trends, demographic and psychographic indications from people that maybe you would say, okay, a credit card company, yeah, I can understand that. But logistics companies, consumer products companies, their data turns out to have a monetizing aspect to them. And do I need to manage all this new stuff of the 21st century as an asset or product? So there is that evolution. There's some quotes I threw in here that I've heard from CEOs as well. There's the old unlock the value of data. And that's absolutely true, a CEO that gets it will say, yes, I can monetize this. I've got something there. Some chief executive officers, the next two comments, are a little surprising to a lot of people. They go, well, that's part of everyone's job anyway. And what do you mean we're not doing that? You mean we should have this now. The governance makes perfect sense. If you're going to have something, you're going to put rules around it and you're going to make sure it's accurate. What do you mean it's not? And you'll hear a lot of CEOs extremely surprised that the data requires some special attention. You also will understand once you understand that why we run into so many cultural barriers with data quality and governance because we have to tell somebody that the data quality is poor and that somebody has to then in turn run it up the pole eventually to the CEO that they're not doing something that basic business practice has called for for decades. Value from insight and changing from a data company to from a company that makes stuff to a company that's a data company that happens to make stuff. So data governance is becoming one of those functions that the CEO is going to assume is already there. If it's not there, you are building into your enterprise built in traps, built in potholes, landmines, whatever you want to call them. The CEO is thinking this is something that should be normally there. They seem to expect it thanks to our good friend Doug Laney at Gartner Group. And we've been kicking around some data asset valuation things lately. Doug and I connected while I was developing this. And he gave me some analysis on a recent survey that Gartner did where 10% of CEOs say that their company treats information as an asset. But 80% of their respondents think they've operationalized this. And that they actually measure the value of information. And that it is on their balance sheet already. Of course, that is absolutely not correct. In Doug's interpretation, it's maybe 1% of organizations have an idea of the financial impact of their data. So there's this huge gap. And this is where understanding the role of the CEO and data governance is really key to us that are practitioners. They already expect it to be there in some way, shape, or form. That doesn't necessarily mean we're selling to the CEO that data governance is proper or data management. What we're selling is the people between us and the CEO a message that they have to deliver to the CEO that we are a little bit short in this area. And we want to get better at doing that. The CEOs really are very surprised, and I've run into this myself. The one quote on a prior page was one was said directly to me. Which is what do you mean we don't do that now? How can our data not be accurate? All right, I sign a statement under Sarbanes-Oxley every month that says our data is accurate. And now you're telling me the data is not accurate. Is the statement inaccurate? Well, no, the statement's accurate, but a lot of your data is. And that is disconcerting to them. The CEO is going to have internal pressures. First of all, normal customer stuff. Second of all, board level oversight of risk. A CEO is told what to do by the board of directors. Even in a nonprofit organization, or if you're in a government type organization, you still have the equivalent of a board of directors. And they're going to say, don't get us into trouble. We don't want to get into trouble. What you're not going to hear, or what's not going to get you on a CEO's radar, is that the data quality issues, we just have some bad data. If the reports under Sarbanes-Oxley are accurate, and they've been verified and audited, fine. Technologies don't even start the conversation talking about cloud. Lots of data volume, and exabytes, and terabytes, that doesn't care. They don't care, they just don't go there. That's not a legitimate driver at all for a CEO. Externally, though, new regulations, problems with social media, and the fact that an organization, whereas before 20 years ago, you could develop a bad reputation over a period of months. Now you can develop a bad reputation in a period of minutes. A lot of unintended consequences from that. The ability to detect things, and the customers wanting their information anywhere, anytime. Now, all of a sudden, all this data stuff is smack on their radar. And they want the assurances that there are rules and checks and balances in place, so that I don't get into trouble with my board of directors. Again, the fact that we're moving into the cloud, or we're no sequel, or we got a dupe, and don't forget it, they don't care. All right, I think that the biggest example ever given to me was working with a bank, and the chairman of a bank years ago, when we were pitching a very exotic business intelligence and analytics solution. And this person listened very carefully and very thoroughly, and really understood what was going on and gave us a good 45 minutes of precious time. But in the last five minutes he said, I like this, it makes sense, but you need to answer a question for me. Why shouldn't I, for this amount of money, hire 30 smart young MBA people right out of university? Give them a bunch of spreadsheets and good computers and have them do the same thing for me. The results the same, I will have hired 30 people into the job market. I will have 30 people making good money and benefiting their communities. Why do I need to buy all this automation? And he said, and I'm not saying that your idea is a bad idea, I think it's a good one, but I need to explain to my board why I'm not hiring more people and going with automation. So this is the realm of the CEO that you need to be aware of. Our solutions are given a different type of scrutiny as we put the things that we feel are needed to have better managed data out there. The board expects an awful lot of accountability from a CEO. You've read it in the trade magazines and things like that. That the board asked the CEO to resign for some big company or something like that. Well, there's some important reason for this, that there is a corporate governance framework. Now, and that is that the corporate charter and the CEO are monitored by the board. Okay, and the board's accountability is to the shareholders or the ownership structure of that organization. I say this a lot in talks I do and here is evidence. The word governance starts at the top. This is not a new concept to anybody in the realm of business. So the board is governance. We have data governance organizations and we talk about data governance. We talk about the DGO or the office or whatever. That type of metaphor already exists, all right? And the responsibilities of the board are separate and distinct from management. And that means when we talk about CDOs here, we talk about a CDO having an oversight role over governance. And people that are actually doing the data management are on the other side of the coin. I'm sorry, I'm in my office out looking at a field of corn right now. And I said the word corn, I didn't mean to say that, I meant coin. The board doesn't manage the company, it just does oversight. That's the exact same structure we want to put in place with data governance. The CEO is accountable to follow policy stemming from governance. Now, this is why CEOs are surprised when we say we don't have data governance because their life is staying and it's day out. They just have to achieve those goals set by the board. It's not new to them. I don't think you have to excel data governance anymore to a CEO or higher level executives. You need to explain it and you need to justify it as you would any other business justification. That's all, the concept, easy, no problem at all. So where can we tell the CEO that the data governance is going to actually help them? Well, you have a business strategy to hit certain financial targets. And we can help you monetize your data, okay? And that means make money off your data or find out where we are avoiding problems or lowering costs or things like that. Now, of course, that means directly tying what your governance program is or what your data management program is to some business initiative. We're going to talk a little bit about that in a moment here. But to be really, really clear, you want the CEO to give you some air cover. You better be telling that CEO that we're going to have better data because of data governance and that will help us make more money or that will help us lower costs or something like that. The board level oversight of risk is extremely important. We all talk about regulatory risk with data governance because in the medical area and the financial services sector, those types of programs are being driven exclusively almost by compliance of some way, shape or form. But there's also reputation. The CEO of a very large organization is constantly worried about how they look. And if data governance can keep them out of a reputation problem, then you've got a solid business relevant message for the chief executive officer. Liability is not exactly the same as compliance. Yes, with compliance, you can have a fine because you were violated a regulation. But liability also includes civil liability, product liability. Your organization puts out a product and you've sold a million cases of something that's tainted. But you can't tell where those million cases came from or where they've gone because your data's not adequate. That's going to have the CEO's attention right away. So that is another type of risk that you want to be aware of. I talked about social media earlier. Data mobility, Twitter, Facebook, all of that. In a matter of moments, organizations can be absolutely ruined or lose market share or lose enormous amounts of money off their equity because of a tweet. Some recent examples include Elon Musk a few months ago doing a tweet on a car and one of their products. And the stock fell 20% in about 15 minutes for Tesla. So those are things that you can certainly help the CEO with. And notice, none of these are related to good data, better reports, more conveniences for middle management. Protecting data quality at the point of consumption is really, really key. As we monetize data, as our customers consume data, we've kept on them and we feed it back to them, boy, it had better be correct. Again, that's another area where data governance can explicitly provide some help with the accountability that a chief executive officer has. There's the competitive environments as well, which is going to also talk to the ear of the CEO. And again, when I've had sessions with executives and CEOs, the conversations always go right to this. They always go, well, who is, what are my competitors doing? Have they benefited from this as well? Or is this something that I can get an edge on from my competitor? So if we have two public CEOs, and here we have our little scenario for the day, Space Lease Brockets and Cods Well Cods. And for those of you that are too young to remember these, there's an excellent entry on Wikipedia on the Jetsons. But seriously, the CEO is going to support data governance or get support from data governance, obviously strategy and goals. So data governance specifically says we are going to help achieve these types of things. It can't cost more than it can help bring in. Now, I know a lot of organizations immediately jump on, well, we're going to do data governance and so we need to go hire our data governance people. And that is the last thing the CEO wants to hear that you're going to add over end. And I've got clients that do this because they feel they're not staff well enough to do it and they've got to go outside. But if that gets up to the top, you're going to get some scrutiny on that. Because why are you adding overhead when you should have been doing this for the last 20 or 30 years anyway? You don't want data governance to add risk or it has to be intended to eliminate risk. And the other thing the CEO is going to be really concerned about is the culture. We talk about organization change management all the time on these webinars. And you hear it a lot on the whole conference, circuit and things. But that CEO is incredibly engaged with how they do things in an organization, which is your culture. And you can't disrupt it. So if you're going to come in and say, well, to do data governance, everybody needs to do things differently and they just have to deal with that. You know what? That message is going to fall on deaf ears. You must learn to leverage the culture. If you do have to make a massive cultural change, it has to be certainly clear and certainly very, very gradual. You're not going to get any support from a CEO if you are putting it next to an IT project that might get shaky or has the appearances of being high risk. That's just not going to work. I mean, we say all the time if you're going to do master data management, you must do data governance. That's absolutely true. But if that master data management project isn't being managed tightly and managed well, you are not going to get any air cover from an executive for data governance for that. Because it's going to start to look like another bad IT project. If you get the appearance that you're going to hold back a strategic initiative, that we would be doing better in our market and you're in the way, you're not going to get the air cover you need to do data governance. You have to support the organization's vision and mission. That means for many organizations, you have to know what your organization's vision and mission statements are. And a lot of people have to go look those up. You're not going to get sustaining support if middle management is distracted by this, if they feel that it's something that's getting in the way. Or you have not gone through the effort to fully explain and educate what data governance is, what's different, what's the same, why it's not new, and why it is absolutely mandatory. But if you haven't done that and you're just saying here comes a project, here comes governance with it, you're going to falter. Again, the CEO mindset is so useful when we're working with data governance because it really helps us shape our message and makes our message a lot more relevant. The next area I want to talk about is middle management. All management issues around governance have two simple concepts. There's one, there's a management concept and there's a human emotion concept. And these are things that take the heart because the CEO is thinking of this all the time, stuff flows downhill. Someone is going to try to push it away if they can. Someone is going to try to avoid accountability if it seems new. If it seems risky and you will have responsibility and accountability pushed below where it should be because that's just a nature of business. The other aspect is part of human behavior or human emotion. Humanity and our actions can be boiled down into two psychologically, physiologically proven emotions, love and fear. And fear is a root motivator. So unless you're passionate about something and really in love with it, then the only other thing, and you're not that, then the only other thing motivating you is fear. So it's really important to consider these cuz that's the level the CEO is thinking of. So here I have, and those of you that were on last month saw a similar chart when we talked about that. We're going to use the same metaphor to talk about decision making and data governance scenarios. So if we have, when we start at the lower left-hand corner, and move our way to the upper right, we're going to see some common patterns or some common answers that we see in the world of governance and data management. The CEO will consider all of these types of resistance and obstacle patterns. The CEO is not going to override things and say, I'm sorry everybody, tomorrow we need to do something entirely different than we did yesterday. Now that might happen in a rare burning platform situation, but in general the CEO is not going to shake the culture if they don't have to do that. However, if we get to points one and four on this, the CEO will give you air cover. So that's the thought processes that we try to achieve. So if we look at number one, we see this still to this day. If we go back to the chart that I had with, I got from Dr. Redmond earlier, is the inadvertent activity and the reckless nature of that activity. And that is someone saying all this data talk is a passing fad. It's just another IT type thing and we're going to move away from it. We still see that a lot. You don't want to have that, okay? You want to at least have at the ready that data is a lot more important than that. In fact, the Gartner group data that I presented is good to have. So look, your executives already think this stuff is here. But now you're saying you don't even think it's important, all right? That's a powerful message. I'm going to go up to number three. So we'll talk about the negative ones here first. And that is deliberately being reckless. That is, we see that we have data governance. It seems like a good idea. It's going to take too long. It's going to be inconvenient. So we're going to make the call not to do it. And that is deliberate, but it's also reckless. Because remember, a lot of people running the organization think you already are doing something like this. Prior data management, look at number two now. Activities have created obstacles. We've learned something. Boy, we would love to be super analytics driven. But we can't pull together data to make a decision to save our lives. And that's because we've developed all these disparate systems, etc., etc. But we know we need to fix this. We're going to remove these obstacles. We're going to move forward. So you're being prudent, even though you inadvertently got yourself into a mess. You're going to be prudent and try to get yourself out of that mess. Of course, we'd all like to have number four happening all the time, where we deliberately say, oh my, business needs to go here. Corporate governance requires this. Then we must go ahead and do a data governance program. And of course, if you have that, then you're going to get some air cover ordered or provided by a chief executive officer, because it's right in alignment with the business goals. It's a deliberate activity to achieve what the business wants to achieve. And you're bound to get support for that. If your organization is mired in one or three, which is deliberately or inadvertently just saying, we're not going to do this. We're going to ignore it. What you need to tell the CEO then or run up the poll is there are distinct consequences for this that other organizations have had. And those need to be demonstrated. If the CEO sees that making business strategies are threatened again, you're going to have their attention. We're coming up here towards the last couple of panels. We're going to talk about middle management though and what we can do about them, because those tend to be the obstacle. So we have a couple of pages of scenarios here. First of all, the one scenario that I see all the time is what I would call the threat to measured success. Now measured success would be something like an objective that if a manager hits it, they get a bonus or a reward. That's measured success. In the development area, in applications development and IT, what we always hear, of course, is it's a delay to the project, right? The chief executive officer is most likely to back up development at that point unless you have a counter argument to that. Now there can be two counter arguments to that. One sounds a little glib, but it's absolutely true. If this will delay the project, then show us that everything to date has been on time and met needs. If it has, then what we think is we're going to shorten that and improve it. We have backed off in our data governance world just going toe to toe with app dev saying, I'm sorry, we can actually help you. And the rivalries need to be set aside. The architecture area, alignment and business information metrics won't be effective. This has manifested a couple of ways. First, you'll have someone talking about metrics saying, we're not sophisticated enough to measure anything. Well, my comeback there, when someone, when the vice president says I talk to the CEO and they say we're not effective, we're not mature enough to measure anything. Well, my question for that is, what is it you are measuring? Because you have to be measuring something because the board is holding you accountable for something that is measurable. And what are those some things? And if those some things exist, let's list them and let's tie what we're doing to those something. So if you want to create a new market or expand into an existing market, you're measuring that market. And if you say, well, what are the barriers to that? Why can't we do it? You're going to find invariably that there's a data related barrier to there. And you say, we are going to help reduce or eliminate that barrier. And we can measure along with that. Another argument you hear is around alignment and explicit efforts to say a data project or a data governance effort will result in X dollars or X percent of return. And I have had executives just look me right in the face and say, we can't do that because when that happens, some business area says, oh, we must get all the attention here because we are contributing. Our project and the data governance of our project is going to make more money than other people. And it becomes a hammer for organizations to use against other parts of the organization to disrupt a holistic oversight of data. So it kind of re-silos governance. It re-silos, and I think I just made that word up, re-silos data management because they will see we've got our numbers, we've got our targets and you can't possibly get in a way of hitting these targets by having other areas do it. And it becomes kind of an excuse to not prioritize things from an enterprise view. The answer to that is the CEO is going to have the answer to that and ask, like, wait a second. We all have the same enterprise name on our paychecks. Everything you're doing is at the end of the day for the enterprise. It is not for your particular business area. The only reason we do an alignment exercise list, the only reason the CEO does a strategic alignment exercise, by the way, is to get a big picture of all the moving parts that have to happen. And where might I have to put priority? But also, and where might I have to adjudicate some conflicts here? The reason we think an enterprise view of our data requirements, of course, is so we can do a holistic architecture and a flexible strategy for managing and governing all of the data. We aren't looking for little areas to get a favor or little areas to win a shouting match between managers. So you have to look at the alignment exercise the right way. This is where the CEO mindset helps you a lot. Look, we're talking more money, more customers, low revenue, lower risk. What do you have a problem with when we're talking with those things? The next scenario are just historical perceptions and loss of position and authority. There we go, getting into the fear type thing right now. People will are afraid of having that. In fact, just this morning on a phone call with a customer, we heard that a handful of groups that did some really cool data stewardship work, one of the groups were disappointed in the outstanding results that they got because they felt that it made what they had done historically to date look bad. But yeah, okay, we've got some problems, but you know, we've worked very hard. We've done very good with these old systems. We've done superhuman work to keep things running, and now you're diminishing all of that. So it is a relevant thing to talk about. Also, you'll hear, and the CEOs don't want to hear this, is applications to the rescue, the hero culture. We can fix that. We'll do an application for it. We want to obviously educate away from that. From an architecture type area, we've got to go towards this new technology. We're going to just put it all in the cloud. It's going to, we don't need new processes. We don't need data governance is new processes. That's too much bureaucracy. We don't need that. What we need to do is adopt this type of technology or something like that. And of course, that's not the way to go either. The CEO isn't going to want to hear about this technology argument. The CEO isn't going to want to hear about a specific application to the rescue. Therefore, you're communicating like a CEO when you rise above these arguments and say, yes, but we're doing something for the enterprise. Another area with lots of position and authority is with the growth of the chief data officer. A real issue they're running into and most CDOs tend to report up to or close to the chief executive officer. And what you're hearing, a lot of them get is, okay, another, the CFO might say this or any type of, or the controller or some executive vice president will say, all right, you're the chief data officer. You've got this data thing. We're just going to go about and do what we're doing. You're going to fix the data. You're going to own the data, which is no different than saying IT owns the data 20, 30 years ago. And you're going to do data governance and we're just going to keep moving on. Now that comes directly from a loss of position and authority. Again, the air cover from the CEO is going to be, wait a minute. This is an enterprise perspective. I have assumed for a long time that we're doing something like this. You have to maintain this enterprise perspective. The CDO's role is to have you do better, teach you to do better with your data, not do your jobs for you. Because if you start to get into the scenario where the CDO is going to do things for other areas, what have you done? You've added overhead. You have contraindicated one of the main drivers of the chief executive officer, which is to watch expenses. So you can see where some of these typical scenarios play into the CEO view of things with that. So just to wrap up, and then we're going to have some nice time here for questions and answers. CDO's are playing an increasing role in these types of activities where the chief executive officer or the executive team is becoming very, very visible to this. But the message they're bringing is not a message of data management, data models, technology architectures. It's a message of we need to do this because it's good business. Because a lot of people might already be assuming we are doing this. Now, before we all run out and say, I'm going to talk to my CEO, think about what kind of organization you have. You might be in a nice mid-sized organization closely held, and maybe the CEO is the founder. And you can walk down the hall and sit down and say, hey, Mary, how you doing? Let's talk about governance. But if you're a massive Fortune 50 mega corp, you're not going to do anything like that. So the engagement of the CEO is very, very dependent on orientation size span and the data centricity of the organization. Now, what that doesn't mean is they won't care about what data governance can offer. What it means is you're going to have to do an awful lot of thinking like them to get them to see and have that visibility that if you think that you need that, or work with trusted lieutenants that have the air of the CEO and can do these things and the CEO will allow them and give them the air cover to go do that. So some specific actions that you can actually take yourself. I hope that some of you out here are listening and you're on some type of data governance work or talking about it or a data management team and talk about it. So here's some things you can do. Educate your executives. And focus on those areas two in four in the matrix. One, let us acknowledge publicly that if we could go back in time, knowing what we know down, we would have done things differently. Now, we all understand that's part of our human experience. I have some adult children and I adult children are now reaching a point in their lives where they're saying, well, if I could be young again, I would like to be 20 years old and do that again. Well, that's assuming that you're 20 years old knowing what you know now. And of course, if there was a time machine, your 20-year-old self wouldn't be all that brighter than it was before. So what you have to do in area two is just acknowledge that things were the way they were, but now we need to move away from them in a prudent and a diligent manner. Luckily, you might be in a number four area and say, we've got to do this. Data is an asset. We have to monetize our data and away we go. Well, the next thing to do is align to real strategic business initiatives. Get an understanding. Get the CEO's view of your organization. And it's not, we need to stand up a system with this data in it and it's got to have this level of accuracy so someone can do analytics. Forget that. That is a requirement. Okay. Yes, it drives a lot of efforts and it's probably okay to justify it if you get it, but still step back to that 50,000-foot view and look at how your business will benefit from this. And that means take a look at what are we doing to get more customers? What are we doing to lower expenses? What are those high-level board strategies? If you're publicly traded and you haven't read it, read your annual report. It will give you enormous amounts of insight. The CEO wrote that or had someone write it for him, but the CEO will have signed that. And that is directly reflecting what the board of directors wants. The last thing is there are resistance areas that we understand now. There's been enough work done that we know for sure applications development is going to fear loss of power because they're not paid to do good things with data. They're paid to get applications in on time on budget. Well, if that doesn't change, they're going to be a resistance. They're not bad people. They're just paid and insented differently. But that's a resistance area. Anywhere in the middle management or what affectionately is called the clay layer once in a while, if anyone sees any threat to prestige, reputation, or authority, they are going to provide some type of resistance. Think like the CEO, all right? We're going to make more money, lower costs and all this. Which of those three things are you having a problem with? Now, I'm saying you don't want to be insulting like that, but you need to be diplomatic, of course. But you need to say, look, we've looked at our strategic initiatives. This is where the company needs to go. This is where we can contribute to that. You will get arguments by saying, no, we don't think so. That's just another IT problem, which puts us in that number, the lower left-hand corner of that matrix, number one. No, it's not. As long as organizations now are talking about monetizing data and doing more with data and being a 21st century organization where data is the fuel, not the lubricant, as long as those are in the conversations of the organization, those traditional resistance areas won't stand up to CEO scrutiny. They are just strictly ways for someone to defend a position that they feel uncomfortable in. So there's some little to-dos there. We have our 10 minutes left for a discussion at this point. I will turn that back over to our moderator, and we can go through the questions. I can leave this slide here, Tony. We can go back to control on your side, too. All right, John. Yeah, you might as well just flip to the last one there. So if anybody wants to follow up with you, they can. Likewise, if anybody would like to follow up with our sponsor, Calibra, you'll be receiving some information in Shannon's follow-up email, along with a link to the recording and to the slides. So those are some of our most common questions. The slides are available in that follow-up email. All right, so I don't have a whole lot of time for questions here. There are numerous, John, around organizational politics and culture and dealing with some of those types of issues. Let me start with a real quick one. It was the very first question somebody asked, is if you have the opportunity to present about data governance to the CEO, how long should your presentation be? I have my answer. I'm sure you have yours. We'll tell everyone, Shannon can start taking bets on whose answer is the shorter period of time, right? I'm thinking 15 minutes. If you can't get it across in 15 minutes, you're going to lose them. All right, well, I was going to say 30 seconds. So I'm big on the idea of an elevator pitch there. But... Oh, well, that's the elevator. Well, I thought we had presentation, but no. That's a good point, Tony. All of this requires the elevator pitch, right? Absolutely good point. Okay, so from first to last, the most recent question I asked was around how do you address the mindset that data governance is a project that'll just be done and then we can go back to business as usual? Yeah, it goes back to the fact that governance isn't new. If your organization has any type of board structure, the response is our board-level governance is not ever done. Our oversight, our financial governance is never done. Our due diligence for product liability, all these other things, that is never done. We are talking the same thing here. By that nature, it's not a project. If they still choose to think that, then they don't understand what you're doing yet. That is a... I'd like to say, well, they're just stupid and get them out of the way and move on. No, you just haven't educated, right? The message hasn't been delivered yet. All right, so there are a number of questions that are sort of a similar theme, particularly in a big organization, politics or management structure or whatever. It doesn't really allow a lot of folks who are working on data governance to reach up and communicate to the board or C-level folks. There's a similar question about the CIO and what is the CIO's role in all of this? I guess to try to knit this out, in a big organization, how do you communicate up the organization these key importance of data governance and get that support in return? Is there a formula to that? Do you have any examples where people do that special? It comes down to that strategic alignment. This is just something we stumbled into 10, 12 years ago. We did an alignment exercise and said, I'll just use a generic example. An organization says we need to have 5% more penetration into the Generation X marketplace next year, all right, which is a legitimate driver for an awful lot of companies right now. We said, well, if you're going to do that, we've got to use data this way and have this kind of data if they're ready and these types of systems to deliver the data. We presented those to some people and what typically happens is how did you know that? Well, it was in your strategic plan. The second thing is, are you sure that's the most recent view of things? We think so, that's the most recent documents we uncovered. What you end up doing, if funny how this works out, is you get someone saying, well, that really makes sense. I like this a lot, but we need to verify that this is still where we're heading and that this resonates with the leadership. If your sponsors or your steering committee or whatever are truly engaged with what you're doing, they will take this and run it upstairs themselves. They, you do not need to do it. They will say, let's get this verified because you're driving our entire strategy and architecture from a business strategy. Well, yeah, that's what we'd like to do. That's what we should do all the time, but they've never seen it before in a lot of cases and it's new, which is a good thing because they will run it up the flight pole themselves. So the short version of my answer is, do some type of strategic alignment exercise and get it to your sponsors and ask them for their help to verify that this is accurate. I met with another CEO who looked at what we did and it was run up to the CEO and he said, I want to talk to these folks. They dragged us in, scared the daylights out of us. And he said, I've been asking these guys at the corner for 10 years for a document like this. How long did it take you to do it? And he said, oh, about two or three weeks on and off. So doing this exercise tends to generate some interest in it. And I'll stop there so we have time for more questions. Okay. Yeah, we don't have a whole lot of time left. There was a question around data maturity and when it's appropriate to try to introduce data governance. And so it's basically saying, do you have to wait for the maturity of your data management program to reach a certain level before it's appropriate to start with data governance? No, no, no. Everyone is, short version, I think maturity is a great metric. We need to do maturity. We need to know where we are so we know where we're going. That said, we're really emphasizing that an awful lot in lieu of other things. And that is if you do some data governance in some way and prove its value, that goes a long way towards more data governance. But if you delay it until you're at a certain level, you lose that opportunity. So I don't think that you need to wait for a certain level of maturity. Okay. And this one's going to be tough to answer in a short amount of time. But how do you drive data governance in an organization operationally across different departments, lines of business, et cetera, when it has been sold strategically to the C-suite? And if you can get an answer to that one in 30 seconds, that'd be great. If it's been sold to the C-suite and the C-suite is providing air cover, I would have a question back. Why can't you spread it across the company if the C-suite is providing air cover for you? It just means the C-suite has to appoint sponsors for you that will carry their desires through and allow that to manifest itself in your data governance effort. Allow those people, if they've sold it and approved it and they like it and want it, let them carry the message for you. Don't try to fight it out with middle management yourself. Yeah, I was going to say, I think that question gets to some of the issues you were talking about with respect to middle management. Basically, you have to tackle a lot of those problems, preferably with the cover that you mentioned from above, but at least understand the issues that you're dealing with. We're going to have to cut things short there. If there are any questions who did not get to, we'll attempt to answer them in writing with Shannon's follow-up. Thank you again to our sponsors at Kaliber. I greatly appreciate their support and John for bringing your expertise today. I will hand back to Shannon for a final wrap up and see you at the same time next month. Look forward to it. I think we're going to talk about Chief Data Officer and metadata. Shannon? Yes, yes. Thank you, Tony and John for another great presentation as always and thanks as always to our attendees who have so many great questions and are interact with everything that we do. As Tony mentioned, I will send a follow-up email by end of day Monday with links to the slides and links to the recording of this presentation. And as Tony mentioned, thanks to our sponsor Kaliber who enabled us to make all these webinars happen for you. So I hope everyone has a great day. Again, John and Tony, thank you so much for taking the time to present. All right. Thank you, Shannon. Thank you, John. Bye-bye all. Good, everybody. Bye-bye.