 Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of Data Diversity. I would like to thank you for joining the current installment of the Monthly Data Diversity Webinar Series, Real-World Data Governance, with Bob Sinner. Today Bob will discuss three ways to manage your data steward sponsored by InfoJax. 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. If you'd like to chat with us or with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so. Just click the chat icon in the bottom middle of your screen for that feature. For questions, we will be collecting them by the Q&A in the bottom right-hand corner. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag RWDG, Real-World Data Governance. And 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 Nam for a word from our sponsor. Nam, hello, and welcome. Hi, Shannon. Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. It is InfoJax's pleasure to sponsor this webinar. My name is Nam Tran. I head up the Data Governance Practice at InfoJax, where we provide end-to-end governance services to the market, which means that my team supports our customers at any stage in their data governance journey, which can range from building a business case for data governance, creating a framework or implementing InfoJax Data 360, our governance platform. And through those types of engagements that we have with our customers, the one thing that I've seen consistently in many data governance programs is the need for data stewards. Now, Bob is going to discuss different ways to manage data stewards today, but first I want to take a few minutes to set the stage and briefly talk about why data stewards are important to a data governance program and therefore need to be effectively managed. Now, if you have any questions, please send them over to the Q&A session and I'll be happy to address them after. Data stewards are responsible for managing the data domain, which they are owned in their respective business units. What makes them critical to a data governance program is the multiple roles that they hold, starting with being a data domain expert. This includes resolving data quality issues, providing data access to the appropriate people, defining which is the correct data to use, depending what the purpose of that usage is, or providing business requirements for certain key projects within the company and so on. They are effectively the go-to person for a particular data set within the organization. This already makes them very important to the organization and a perfect candidate to be the governance representative for their business unit. And as a representative, they will need to participate in the data governance program to help set up the chosen tool to create and manage business data, such as definitions, business rules, and quality controls. They also provide inputs into policies and participate in the definition of processes and procedures within their business units to comply with those policies. Essentially, they help define how data governance works in their business unit. And last but not least, the biggest reason they are so important to the program is because they are the adoption champion for the program. Now data stewards work closely with the user community to solve data issues and inquiries on a daily basis. So they have a very strong relationship to those users. Therefore, they are your best advocate for data governance because they have the credibility, the constant contact with the user community to keep promoting the benefits of data governance and encourage those users to follow any new processes and guidelines created from the program. And that concludes my brief talk on why data stewards are so important to data governance. Now, without further ado, I'm going to hand it back to Shannon to kick off on the main topic of this webinar. Non, thank you so much and thanks to InfoJX for sponsoring this and helping us to produce all of these great webinars for everybody. And let me introduce our speaker for today, Bob Siner. Bob is the president and principal of KIK Consulting and Educational Services and the publisher of the data administration newsletter, tdan.com. Bob has been a recipient of the Dama Professional Award for significant and demonstrable contributions to the data management industry. Bob specializes in non-invasive data governance, data stewardship and metadata management solutions. And with that, I will give the floor to Bob to get today's webinar started. Hello and welcome. Hi, Shannon. Hi, Nam. It was great to have InfoJX as a sponsor for today's webinar. And I agree wholeheartedly with everything that Nam said about the importance of data stewardship and data stewards to your data governance program. This is one of my favorite subjects. If you've attended webinars before, you know that I love to talk about the data stewards. Actually, I talk about the data stewards as really being the engine that runs the data governance program. But today I want to talk to you about three different approaches to managing your data stewards. And I think you'll find that they're quite unique and they're quite different from each other. And it should be interesting to hear some feedback from all of you as to whether or not these things make sense and that they're at the appropriate ways to be able to manage your webinar or manage your stewards throughout your organization. So before I get started, I wanted to share a couple of things that are going on with me and with data diversity and with data governance in general. First of all, as you know, I do the real-world data governance webinar series. We've been doing it for several years, always on the third Thursday of the month. And next month is, that's actually the earliest in the month that it can be, the third Thursday of November 15th. We'll be talking about data governance in three levels of metadata. And those three levels of metadata are not the same as the three different approaches to managing your stewards. But I talk about three levels of metadata quite often and it's great to be able to have a webinar on that. So if you're interested, please register. Also, as Shannon had mentioned, I specialize in non-invasive data governance. And there's a book on non-invasive data governance that is available from Amazon or techniques or wherever you have an interest in purchasing books. Also, I'll be speaking at some upcoming data-versity events. In several weeks, actually the first week in December, I'll be speaking in Delray Beach at the Data Governance Winter event. And then I am lucky enough to be speaking at the Enterprise Data World event as well. And that's in Boston in March. There's an online learning plan for those people that like to learn more about non-invasive data governance. And you can find that through the Data-Versity Training Center. I am the publisher of TTAN.com, the Data Administration newsletter. If you're not familiar with it, please go out and take a look. Lots of new articles from a lot of different people. I don't write all the articles. Lots of different perspective on different aspects of managing and governing your data. And last but not least, KIK Consulting and Educational Services is my consulting company. And that is the home of non-invasive data governance. So for more information on those things, please go and visit those resources. Today, I'm going to talk about this handful of subjects related to three ways to manage your data stewards. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go into some detail as to the three different ways that I consider different possibilities of ways that you can manage stewards within your organization. Then I'm going to talk about some of the things you might want to consider when you're selecting the appropriate way to manage your data stewards. We'll talk about the benefits and challenges associated with each of those methods. We'll talk about how do we get our organization prepared for the approach that we're taking to implementing a stewardship approach to governing data within the organization. Like I said before, NAM really laid it out well that the data stewards are instrumental. Oftentimes, they represent different parts of the organization and how they manage the data associated with those different business functions. And then last, I'm going to talk about when we're looking at these different approaches and these different ways to manage your data stewards, is it important for you to stay true to the single method or maybe it makes sense to create a hybrid approach and select some things from the different approaches and make it fit perfectly to what will be accepted within your organization. I like to get started by sharing several definitions and so I'm going to share a couple with you today. If you look at my definition of data governance as the execution and enforcement of authority over the management of data, that's worded quite strongly. In fact, a lot of the organizations that I work with say it's worded too strongly and they try to temper it down and calm it down so it doesn't really put people on the defensive. And to be honest with you, execution and enforcement of authority sounds more invasive than non-invasive. That's really just the definition of governance. It's not the approach to how you're implementing governance. And the truth is that your definition of data governance and all of the definitions of terms that are really unfamiliar to your organization, it's really important to word those wisely in a way that's going to solicit some type of feedback from the people that are hearing the definition. So at the end of the day, the truth is if you're implementing governance to improve quality, to protect data, to improve understanding of data, it's important that you have the ability to execute and enforce authority. So that's my definition. I'm sticking to it. I think it works well for a lot of organizations. So my definition of data stewardship is particularly focused for today's session. And actually what I think is that stewardship is really the formalization of accountability over the management of data. And people in the organization have relationships to data already. And so to some extent they may already be stewarding the data. And so if we can formalize that type of accountability, and I'll talk about that throughout the webinar today, to formalize what people do with the data that they define, produce, and use, that's a really appropriate place, an appropriate way for a lot of organizations to implement data stewardship rather than assigning people to be stewards. Let's recognize the people for what relationships they have to data, and let's help to formalize what that accountability is associated with that relationship. I mentioned non-invasive data governance. This is the definition that I use for non-invasive data governance. It's really the practice of how we're applying governance in the organization. So it's really separate from the definition of what data governance is. We're talking about applying formal accountability and behavior, and using non-invasive roles and responsibilities. And I've talked a lot about those in past webinars. We're not going to go into the details of what stewards do in this session, but I know it's an interesting subject to a lot of people. But you're going to use the non-invasive roles, and you're going to apply governance to existing processes. And you're going to assure that, as I mentioned before, the definition, the production, and the usage of data is being done appropriately, and it assures that you're being compliant, that you're protecting your data, that you're improving the quality, the understanding, and all of those good things. So really non-invasive describes how governance is applied, and it's not really the definition which I use as execution and enforcement of authority over the management of data. If we're going to stay non-invasive with our approach to governance, the goal is to be transparent, supportive, and collaborative. And so the last definitions, or the last things I want to talk to you about in this piece of the webinar today, is what exactly is a data steward? We all seem to agree that data stewards are a critical component to a successful data governance program. What exactly is a data steward? And if you've heard me talk on the subject before, you know that I say that potentially everybody or anybody in your organization can be a steward of the data, depending on the relationship and what they do with data as part of their everyday job. So I say that a data steward can be anybody in the organization, and that could be somebody who's a business person, it could be a technical person if they define, produce, and or use data as part of their job. And that's a really important thing, because much everybody in the organization does at least one of those things, if not multiple of those things. And actually, these individuals become data stewards really only if they're being held formally accountable for what they do with the data. So the next thing I wanted to do is kind of break down that statement into three components. So I said before, a data steward can be anybody in the organization. You know, if they define, produce, or use data as part of their job, and if they're going to be held formally accountable for what they do with the data. So the easiest way to describe that is people that use data need to be held accountable for how they use the data. They need to protect the data appropriately. They need to share the data appropriately, define it appropriately. And so that's really the distinction between anybody in the organization that defines, produces, and uses data and a data steward. Because a data steward is somebody who does those things, but they're held formally accountable for what they do with the data. So just a different way to look at that. So who is a data steward within your organization? A data steward is basically a person that defines, produces, or uses data as part of their job, as I said before, and that they have a defined level of accountability to make sure that they're assuring quality in the definition of production and use of data. And again, break that term, that expression into three pieces. You know, it's basically anybody in the organization that does any of these activities with data, they have that defined level of accountability for the relationships that they have with the data. So potentially, and you may have heard me say this before, I say that everyone is a data steward. Get over it. In fact, I think that we need to look to cover the entire organization. So that means that we're not going to select a handful of people to be data stewards. What we're going to do is we're going to focus on first inventorying and knowing who defines, who produces, and who uses data across the organization. And if we can define what the accountability is that goes along with that relationship and we can apply that accountability to those people, then those people become data stewards. So when I say everyone's a data steward, get over it, I think that that's really, really important to this thing to keep in mind because it really changes the way that the program will be set up within your organization. So let's jump into the three ways to manage your data stewards. And typically, when I talk about data governance in general and data stewardship in particular, I look at there being three distinct approaches that organizations can use to determine who the stewards are within the organization. And I've talked about the different approaches before. There's that kind of command and control iron fist. You will do this approach to data governance. And there's a specific verb that is used when we're identifying or when we're recognizing that we're associating people in the organization to being data stewards. And the verb that I use is, I'll get my computer to work here, is that people are assigned to be data stewards. That very much feels like a command and control in your face. You will do this approach. So no matter what you're presently doing, if you're assigned to be a data steward, the first thing that I've recognized in organizations is that people tend to push back. I have a day job. I'm busy 150% of the time. I don't know if I have any time to be a data steward. So assigning me to be a data steward may not be the best thing to do. So think about that. If you're in a business role and that you're assigned to be a data steward but you're already too busy, how are you going to take on the role of being a data steward? In the more traditional approach, people are identified as data stewards. And I'll talk a little bit more in detail about each of these different approaches, but the difference is that we're identifying people. So we're not assigning them. We're identifying people in the organization that are going to participate in the role of the governance program as a data steward. And in the non-invasive approach, which is the approach that I talk about a lot, is the mode that I use is that we recognize people as data stewards because being recognized for something, even if it's as simple as being recognized for a relationship that you have to the data, is oftentimes a positive thing. So if you can start out with people and you can tell them, you know what, you already used data. All we're really trying to do is help you to understand how it can be used, how it can't be used, how it can be shared, and those types of things. It's not really necessarily adding anything to their jobs, at least initially and right out of the gate. It depends on what types of activities you involve your stewards in. But I like to use the term recognize people as data stewards because of the positive connotation that comes along with that. So let's talk about each of these different approaches in relationship to the data stewards. And so the first bullet under the command and control approach is that we assign people to be data stewards in a command and control approach. And oftentimes in the organizations that take that approach to associating people as stewards of data, these individuals are assigned as being data owners. And you've got a handful or maybe more data owners. This is like your process owners and system owners. You've got people that you recognize as data owners. Well, I've talked about this before. I don't really like the term owner, although I know a lot of organizations use the term owner. The appropriate term to be using these days is a steward of the data. When you call somebody an owner, it implies that they are, it's their data, that they have responsibility, complete control over it, and that just might not be the case. In the dictionary, the definition of a steward is somebody that takes care of something for somebody else. And so in this situation, it's somebody who takes care of the data for the organization. And when you assign people to be data stewards, typically you're just selecting a specific number of people. It's a very finite number of people. Bob over there, he's the customer data steward. And Rick, he's the vendor data steward. And Mary, she's the product data steward. And so you only have a handful of people or more that you select to be data stewards in the command and control approach. And oftentimes the way it's communicated to people is that you will do this. You know, we're going to assign you into this role and you will do this. It really doesn't matter how much other work you have, you're now the data steward. You've been assigned. You'll do this. And this is truly the most invasive approach to stewardship, is where you assign people into roles rather than identifying or recognizing them. So what are some of the questions that people have about the command and control approach? And these are things that you may want to consider when you're selecting the appropriate approach for your organization. You may ask, you know, how will people in the organization accept being assigned as data stewards? And from my experience, what I've seen is that a lot of people, when they're assigned to be data stewards, they push back. They start asking those questions I mentioned before. Where am I going to find the time? What does this mean to where I presently do? How does it rank among my priorities? And it really helps that you're very clear if you're going to use the term data owner to define what you mean by data owner. So they're going to ask the question of, well, how do you define the role of owner? What responsibility? What accountability do I have for the data? And if we take this approach where we are assigning people to be data stewards, the question really becomes this, are we going to cover the entire organization with just a select number of people? And how are people going to really respond to when you tell them that you will do this? Oftentimes people consider the command and control and the assignment of stewards to being something that's over and above what their existing responsibilities are. And you know what? There's a different way. There's other alternative approaches to associating people with stewardship responsibilities within your organization. So look at the second approach I talked about. In the traditional approach, we're identifying people as stewards and you know what? We still need, it seems like organizations are starting out with these people as being the data owners. Again, so we need to be very clear as to what we're defining as the responsibilities of a data owner. And it's still just a select number of people that are identified to be data stewards and they're told, you know what? You really need to do this. It's less invasive than the command and control approach, but it's still somewhat invasive because people feel as though this is an add-on to what their present responsibilities are. So again, traditional approach is okay, we'll go into a little bit more detail on that in a couple minutes here, but I also wanted to share with you what are some of the questions that people have about the traditional approach. And they're very similar to the questions that people may have about the command and control approach. How are people going to accept being identified as stewards? How are you going to define what it means to be a data owner and really give people clear understanding that the organization owns the data and that they don't really own the data? The question I get a lot is, well, then why are you calling me a data owner if it's not really my decision? You know, basically, the data is owned by the organization. And again, when we cover the entire organization by just identifying people as data stewards and we tell people that you need to do it, but it still feels for a lot of people as though this is going to be over and above what they're presently doing if they've now been identified as data stewards. So let me explain to you what I mean by the non-invasive approach because the non-invasive approach is really quite different than assigning somebody to be a data steward or identifying somebody as a data steward. The verb that I mentioned before that I use is that they recognize people as data stewards. So the people that are data stewards in the organization potentially are recognized by their relationship to the data. And I mentioned before, if you define data, you need to have some responsibility around defining the data, making sure that the metadata that we're collecting, the business glossary terms, the data dictionary, all the information about the data is recorded in such a way that's going to be beneficial to people. And I talk about the fact that that typically everybody in the organization is potentially a data steward and it really covers the entire organization just covering those individuals that you've assigned or that you've identified as being data stewards. One of the data differences in associating stewards in this manner and this approach is that instead of telling them that you will do this or you should do this, the approach is that you're already doing this. You already have this relationship to the data. We need to know what that relationship is and we need to help you to define, produce, and use the data better across the organization. We're not really asking you to change much of your job. I mean, certainly there will be points where things feel a little bit more invasive than you'd like them to, but if we're telling people you're already defining producing and using data or using data, and we're going to help you to understand the implications of how you define, produce, and use data. So this is really what I consider to be the least invasive approach to stewardship and that's why I call it non-invasive, non-invasive governance and non-invasive stewardship. And again, what are some of the questions that people have about the non-invasive approach? How are people going to accept that they're now being recognized as data stewards since you're not really handing them a lot, at least right off the bat, handing them a lot of additional responsibility, then they might not push back as hard as they would push if you're giving them or they're feeling like you're giving them more work to do. I know that Nam mentioned earlier in the session today she talked about the domain responsibility. So oftentimes there's different levels of stewards within the organization. I'm mostly talking about the operational stewards, those people within the business units that define, produce, and use data as part of their job. There's another role that she mentioned, which was the domain steward. It's the subject matter expert within the organization. And right now you might think about, well, if you have a question about loan data or you have a question about product data, who do you go to? Is that person, the subject matter expert, can they provide you information to help you to do your job? So there's differing levels of stewards. There's operational stewards that define, produce, and use data as part of their job, but then there's also the domain steward. And these people potentially are already subject matter experts. I actually had a client ask me a question not too long ago, these people that are domain stewards, that are subject matter experts, that really have responsibility around the subject matter of data, do we need to call them domain stewards? And the truth is no, you don't need to call them domain stewards. Actually the person asked me, can we call them enterprise data subject matter experts? Because that's really what they are. And I said, by all means, let's take a noninvasive approach and let's call them what people recognize them to be already and that's the subject matter expert. So you've got to make sure that you're defining the role of the operational stewards, the people day to day and what they do with the data and where they're held formally accountable. And then the domain stewards, those subject matter experts are really a critical component of most successful data governance programs. And so then the question will we cover the entire organization by following this approach? And this is really important. The answer to that question is yes. It might make your program a little bit more detailed, a little bit more complex. You might need to communicate with more people, or obviously you'll need to communicate with more people, but the fact is that if you can inventory who has responsibility for defining, producing and using data, you can cover the entire organization. So if you keep that in mind and that's what a lot of organizations are striving for, is governance throughout. You're not going to take a handful of people and say, okay, you folks over there, you're going to have responsibility for protecting data, but those folks over there that use the same data, they're not going to protect the data? No, the fact is that you can really look at the relationships people have to data and formalize the accountability that goes along with that relationship and you can do it in such a way that you're telling them, you know what, you're already doing this. We're just going to help you to do it more efficiently, more effectively, more formally. We're going to do it better for the organization. So then really the last question about that approach is, is this an approach suited to fit the culture of your organization? Do you already have people that have responsibility for data that if you just formalized it a bit, that it would cover everybody in your organization? So those are the three different ways primarily. There's the command and control, there's the traditional approach, and then there's the non-invasive approach. So let's talk about what you should do to select the appropriate way to manage stewards within your organization. And I'm going to walk through each of the different approaches and talk about them here real quick, real briefly. So one of the things that we need to consider if we're going to take a command and control approach is the level of the mandate within the organization that's going to be required in order for this approach to data stewardship to be effective within your organization. Who is it in your organization that has to say that we're going to assign people to be data stewards and they're going to need to do whatever data stewards do as well as what they're presently doing. So we've got to look at to see, well who's going to be the one that's going to make this the mandate? Is that we're going to assign people to be stewards and they're going to have to accept that. And oftentimes with the command and control approach, people say data governance is not optional. We're going to need to rule with an iron fist. We're going to need to get people to behave in a desired manner. Even if it's just a handful of people that we have assigned to be data stewards, we do recognize that there's other people in the organization that have accountability for data. We want to make sure that they also behave in a desired manner. And we also need to think about who is the authority or does your data governance team or data governance office or administrator really have the authority to be an implementer of this type of approach to data stewardship? Oftentimes what I find is that the data governance office or administrator or whoever that is that has responsibility for your program doesn't necessarily have the authority to assign anybody anything. And so you've got to think about that when you're determining what's the appropriate approach for you to manage stewards within your organization. All right, let's see here. Here we go. The traditional approach. We've got to think about the same things associated with the traditional approach to stewardship as well. If we're going to tell people that they're data stewards, we're going to identify them as data stewards and help them to understand that they have some additional responsibility, well, what level of mandate is there in the organization that will require people to participate as data stewards to be being identified as being data stewards? You know, we can also, in a lot of organizations that take this approach, they say data governance is something that we all should do. And the key word in that phrase is we should do this. But not necessarily, there's not necessarily a mandate that people have to get involved. And I'll talk a little bit more about it. I compare it to a movie here in a second, but the traditional approach to stewardship is still the same. You want to get people to behave in a desired manner, and if we're going to identify people as data stewards and help them to understand their role, if it's not everybody in the organization, is that going to get us where we want it to get us? Are we going to be able to get people to behave in a desired manner if we just identify them as stewards? And again, also, the data governance team or the office or whatever you call it, do they have the authority to be an implementer of this type of approach to data stewardship? In the non-invasive approach, is there a level of mandate that's even required? If the first thing that we're going to do is inventory who defines, produces and uses data across the organization, it doesn't necessarily have to be a mandate because we're not really asking people to do anything yet. At some point, we're going to be more detailed with what does it mean to use specific types of data? How can you handle data that is classified as being confidential or being private or being public? What level of mandate is there to apply this type of approach to data stewardship? In this approach, data governance is something that's pretty much a matter of fact. You're already doing it, people behave. We can still work to get people to behave in the desired manner, but we have to recognize that there's going to be more people in the organization that we're going to need to involve because there's lots of people that are using data that is classified as being sensitive. So we don't want just some of them to manage the data appropriately. We want everybody who touches the data that is classified a certain way to handle the data appropriately. So the chief idea here is that we want people to behave in the desired manner. And oftentimes, you don't need to have a whole lot of authority to implement this approach to data stewardship. You're just, first of all, like I said, you're recognizing people based on their relationship. And of course, there's going to be some communications and stuff that you need to share with them. But if we look at the fact that everybody is a data steward, it is certainly going to change the way that we need to implement our data governance program. So think about this. When you take the approach, if you decide to take the command and control approach or traditional or non-invasive approach, consider what the impact that's going to have on your organization. So how is it going to impact how you develop your program? And you define roles and responsibilities. Instead of having specific responsibilities for operational data stewards, maybe we can just say that if you use a certain type of data, you're going to be held accountable for how you use that data. How is this going to impact the way that we sell governance across the organization? I've been known to ask people at the beginning of sessions that I've given, how many of your organizations govern your data? And typically I only see some of the hands go up. And then I ask the question again, how many of your organizations are governing your data? And I tell everybody to raise their hands and they look at me kind of odd and I say, well, the fact is that there is governance taking place, informal, inefficient, ineffective. And if we're going to make this cover the entire organization, this is what we need to do with these people based on their relationship to the data. So it really impacts the approach you have and how you sell governance and stewardship to your organization. How do we communicate with people? Well, instead of saying you will do this or you should do this, we communicate by saying you're already doing this. We're going to help you to do it better. You know, we also look at how the approach will affect your ability to influence people to participate as students or how you're going to be able to enforce the rules that are now associated with different relationships to the data. So I think it's a very important consideration to think about what's the impact on the approach that we're taking to associate people as data stewards and what's the impact that that approach is going to have on our ability to develop, sell, communicate, influence and enforce the stewardship aspect of the data governance program that we talked about earlier is, we know is critical to success of a program we need to have data stewards. So the benefits of a command and control approach, well, it depends on your organization. Some organizations need that to be very authoritative. You know, I use in my definition execution and enforcement of authority over the management of data. And the command and control approach is much more authoritative. It's people will have to follow the approach, it's really strictly a top-down approach and it's all about the control of the data. So that can be a good thing for your organization if that's the type of approach that needs to be taken or it might not be as much of a benefit. It might be more of a challenge and we'll talk about that in a second as well. The traditional approach to data stewardship, I mentioned that I kind of compare it to a movie. I compare it to the field of dreams and if you're familiar with the movie Field of Dreams, one of the key lines out of that movie was if you build it, they will come. And so in a traditional approach, you might have an excellently defined program and you may have sold it to management appropriately and the idea is that you even set up a council and you've had clearly defined roles and responsibilities for people but the fact is that in this traditional approach, oftentimes people are going to respond based on the value that they see or the value that they receive from being a data steward. In the non-invasive approach, again, there's less reason for stewards to push back because you're not necessarily handing them anything that they don't already have, at least initially when these people are recognized as data stewards. It's really hard for leadership to reject the non-invasive approach to stewardship because, again, you're not going to say that we're going to only have these groups of people over here protect the data. We're not going to have everybody that touches that data protect the data. They're going to say, no, no, no, we need everybody in the organization to make certain that private data is kept private. That confidential data is kept confidential. So it's really hard for leadership to reject this approach, especially if you can be successful in making certain that everybody with a certain relationship to the data is now being held formally accountable for that relationship to the data. And what that means is, as I've said before, definers are responsible for looking to see if that data is already defined. Producers understand the impact of the data that they're producing. Again, it's very difficult for leadership to reject this idea as being something that doesn't make sense to the organization. No, we're only going to have... We're only going to assign or identify a handful of people as stewards. No, the fact is, we really need to look at the relationships people have to data and formalize our program associated with whatever that relationship is, definers, producers, and users. And the fact is, one of the benefits of the noninvasive approach is they cover the complete organization rather than just a handful of people in your organization. And if you're going to cover everybody in the organization, it's going to make sense to bring in a tool like InfoJix or somebody like that to help with some tool like that to help us to record who's doing what with the data. So it can make it easier for us to be able to communicate with these folks and let them know what it means to have that relationship to the data and how they can govern the data and stewards the data better for the organization. So really, we're changing people's view in general of what data governance is. People here that serve data governance, they want to go running for the hills. They think it's going to be difficult. They think it's going to be over and above when the fact is we can start out our program in a more noninvasive way where we're recognizing people based on their relationships and we're helping them to do a better job of managing the data across the organization. So taking a noninvasive approach, one of the benefits is it changes people's views on what they think about data governance in the different ways that data governance can be applied. So let's talk about some of the challenges. What can prevent command and control approach from being successful? Well, I talk about best practices a lot and one of the very first best practices, if not the first best practice is the leadership in your organization, however that's defined, but they not only support and sponsor the activities of governance and stewardship, but they understand the approach that you're taking to implementing these things in the organization. People will push back when they're told what to do if they're assigned additional work. People need to make time to be stewards. They're evaluating how well they... People don't like it when they're assigned things that they didn't have some level of agreement of being assigned. So there is a lot of pushback. That's one of the biggest challenges of the command and control approach is that your senior leadership might not really understand what the heck it is that you're trying to do and say, you know what, where am I going to find time to do this? I don't have time for this. The fact is they're already doing it and if we take that approach that's a definite benefit or a challenge or a sub-benefit to the non-invasive approach. What can prevent the traditional approach from being successful? Well, oftentimes leadership supports and sponsors, but they don't truly understand that just by having a program there doesn't mean that our data is going to improve. It's going to improve in protection. They don't necessarily understand that we really need to cover the entire organization. One of the challenges also is that people will follow the approach if they see that there's some value in it for them. That's a guarantee that if there's nothing that they're getting out of it, when are they going to find time to be data stewards? They're only going to really participate if they see that there's some advantage to their doing so. And that's the only time that their management is going to find time is that they see that there's going to be some benefit in their area. So one of the challenges, again, of the traditional approach is that only specific people are going to be evaluated on how well they steward data. And as I mentioned before, everybody is a data steward and we should really get over that fact. We really need to make sure that we have complete coverage for our organization. What can prevent the non-invasive approach? Well, I've heard a lot of different things. I've heard people say that if everybody is a data steward, then nobody is a data steward. And the fact is I just can't understand that logic. The fact is that we need to make people or get people to be held formally accountable for what they do with the data. That's what governance is all about. It's what stewardship is going to solve for our organization. And in fact, instead of it really being a do-nothing approach, it's more like a do-everything or a do-everybody approach. You know, one of the challenges of doing it is you've got to be very incremental in the way that you roll it out to your organization. You can't take the big bang approach and turn data governance on for the entire organization if you're planning on the fact that everybody in the organization potentially would be a steward of the data. It adds complexity to addressing everybody in the organization, as I mentioned before. And one of the challenges might be that leadership doesn't understand that there is this type of approach to implementing a governance program. But they might want to know, well, how are we going to cover everybody in the organization when a lot of the traditional program or the command and control type programs only call out for a handful or dozen or dozens of stewards rather than everybody in the organization. So those are some of the benefits and challenges of each of the different approaches. In the time I have remaining here, I'd like to talk about how do we prepare our organization or do we prepare for how the organization will respond to these different approaches. And again, I'm going to walk through command and control, traditional, non-invasive, but I also wanted to introduce the idea of the hybrid approach. And I'm going to share with you right now or on the next slide several of the core components to a successful data governance, information governance, information as an asset, whatever you call your program. You don't need to stay command and control in all aspects, in all components or traditional or non-invasive. You can pick the best approach for your organization of each of these different approaches depending on how that will best fit for your organizational culture. And I want to share this diagram which you may have seen before if you've attended my webinars. This is one that I traditionally use to compare if you look across the columns there's command and control, traditional, non-invasive, and the five core components of a successful governance program are roles and responsibilities and the authority that goes with those roles, governing processes, making certain that we do effective communications, that we have metrics, and we can measure the success of our program and that we're going to use tools, we're going to use things that can help us in our organization to implement governance and to really keep and manage what it is that these data steward folks do across the organizations. That's where the tools become really valuable. So what I wanted to do is spend just a couple of minutes talking about each of the different components based on each of the different approaches that I mentioned earlier. And so the first one, roles, we've already talked about that quite a bit. The difference between the command and control approach and the others is that in the command and control people are assigned, they're given new levels of authority, it feels as though it's over and above what they're presently doing and we know how people can react when that is the approach that you're giving them to, associating them as data stewards. In the traditional approach, people are told that they have a new role, they're given new levels of authority. In the noninvasive approach, again, people are recognized for their relationships and those levels of authority, those are now formalized across the organization rather than being informal, inefficient, and ineffective. In the processes, in the command and control approach, a lot of organizations look at the idea that we might have to do all new processes and all of our processes will be governed where in a lot of the traditional approaches, organizations have a single data stewardship process or even a single data governance process and they call it that, they call it the governance process or the stewardship process when really the process is what the process is. We don't need to change our processes as much as apply governance to them and that is what noninvasive really focuses on. We're going to apply stewardship to the process rather than redefining the processes or have a single process for the organization. In the noninvasive approach, appropriate processes are governed and you are applying governance to them rather than rewriting the processes themselves. Communications is key instead of saying you will do this or you should do this, you start with the approach of you already do this. You're already a steward. You can't really opt out of being a steward if you use data that needs to be protected. You can't really opt out of being a data steward if you're producing data for the organization because you have to have some formal level of accountability for how you're producing the data, how you're using the data. So again, this is a key factor here instead of saying you will do this or you should do this, so if you're already doing this, we're going to help you to do it better. If you've ever heard of the VASF commercials, we don't make the tires, we don't make the tape, we make it better. Well, that's really what data governance and data stewardship is doing for your organization. It's formalizing accountability where there might not have been a formal accountability before. When it comes to metrics and looking at the different approaches that organizations use to approach a lot of organizations look to measure return on investment from data governance or from data stewardship, and that's really difficult to do. And typically what I suggest to organizations is that they look for return on investment in all of their other data initiatives if we're putting money into building an analytical platform or to building a data warehouse or implementing a new ERP system or whatever the major projects are in your organization that require use of data and that's pretty much all of them. You're going to look for return on investment from those investments rather than return on investments from specifically governing your data. At least that's what I've found to be most successful is don't look to put dollars and cents on where governance is making money for your organization or saving money. It's going to be in these other uses of data across the organization. In the traditional approach they typically measure the data itself. What's the quality of the data? How is the quality of the data improved? Typically in non-invasive approaches to governance we're really measuring the advancements of the organization and some of those advancements might include increasing people's awareness of what they do with the data and why it matters. I had a client recently where we hummed science all over the place to think before you and then I had a blank line and then the word data. Think before you define data. Think before you produce the data or am I producing the data appropriately? Think before you use the data that just seems to make a lot of sense and if we can increase the awareness across the organization then people will be more will have a higher tendency to do what's being asked of them when it comes to how they manage data and last but not least in the components in that comparison diagram that I shared with you is the tools and again very happy to have InfoJix as a sponsor of this webinar certainly data governance tools become a big enabler of successful data governance programs and data stewardship programs. We need to record the information about the stewards and what processes they're associated with, what data they have responsibility with but the differences in the approaches that I suggest is that oftentimes in a command and control approach organizations will purchase the tool first and they'll start to try to fit their governance program or their stewarding of data into the tools that they have and that's what I typically find in more of a command and control approach. We have this tool, we're going to use it, we're committed to it, let's fit our organization into the tool. In a more traditional approach typically organizations will look to leverage the tools that they have in house first and that will help them to define what capabilities they have and what capabilities they don't have or should I say what capabilities that they need. So in the traditional approach oftentimes still the tool drives the solution but since we're looking to leverage existing tools first we're really defining the requirements for our organization before we go out and get the tools and in the non-invasive approach it's somewhat similar to the traditional and we're going to build tool kits and we're going to bring in a tool that's going to enable successful solution of our governance program. So I went through each of the different components and each of the different approaches and as you can see it's not necessarily important to stick to one approach for all of those different facets all of those different components of data governance and data stewardship. So when we talk about staying true to the method is it important to pick one approach and to follow that the truth is that many organizations take a hybrid approach where they might be more invasive for some of the components and less invasive for other components. So there's nothing to say that you need to follow the non-invasive approach from suit to nuts or that you need to follow the command and control or traditional approach that way. The truth is that you really need to customize the program to fit into work in your organization and get people involved the way that's going to be most successful within your organization. So the things that I've discussed in today's webinar the first thing I did was I went through the details of the three different ways to manage our stewards and to associate people as being data stewards. We talked about how to select the appropriate way which of these approaches is proper or work best in your organization. We looked at the benefits and challenges of each of the different approaches to either assigning people to be stewards or identifying or recognizing people to be stewards. We talked a little bit about preparing for how the organization will respond to each of the different methods. And then last but not least, we kind of let out the caveat that you don't necessarily need to follow one approach from the beginning to end. You could actually use multiple just different components using different approaches to do data governance. And so with that, after a quick reminder of the webinar next month, so next month in the real world data governance series, I'm going to be talking about data governance in the three levels of metadata. And I assure you the three levels are not the command and control traditional and noninvasive. They're more of a business level or a data I'm sorry a terminology level, a business level and a technical level and we'll go into a lot of detail in that webinar. And that's on September 15th at 2pm. So please sign up for that webinar and with that I'm going to turn it back over to Shannon to see if we have any questions today. Bob, thank you so much and of course we've got a lot of great questions coming in to answer the most commonly asked questions. Just a reminder, I will send a follow-up email to all registrants by the end of day Monday for this webinar with links to the slides, recording and anything else requested. So jumping right in here to get as many in as we can and the time and feel free to jump in with these as well. Do you distinguish data stewards between business steward and technical steward? No, I typically don't although there's lots of organizations that have people that they define as business stewards and technical stewards really depending on what part of the organization that they're in. But if they're a technical person and they're using protected data they're going to have the same responsibilities as a business person who's using that protected data. So I don't typically differentiate but you can, it doesn't mean that you can't do that. I'd be very curious to see what Nam has seen in regards to the use of the term business steward or technical steward. Hi Bob, so in my experience it's terminology right but in my experience the Baker organizations where they have a clear segregation of duty a clear line between the business and the IT then they would differentiate it more but in a medium size of smaller companies where one person wears multiple hats, not so much. That's a great answer. That makes perfect sense to me. What is the difference between a data steward and a domain lead? Well, I'll be glad to address that. A data steward as I said can be typically anybody in the organization that does anything with the data a domain steward typically has a higher level of responsibility so those definers, producers and users of data I consider them to be at the operational level really within a specific business unit but when you get to become a domain steward or a subject matter expert as I alluded to earlier you're now having responsibility for a subject matter of data across business units. So there is a big distinction between what I consider to be a subject matter expert and a domain steward or a person that's a day-to-day definer, producer and user. So I think there's a definite distinction between domain stewards and operational stewards. Who should the data stewards reach out to in case there is a need for escalation? Would it be a executive data steward? Well, and you know what that's a great question and we've done webinars on roles and responsibilities there's articles on TDAN about how I typically define an operating model of roles and responsibilities. Typically the escalation goes from the operational level to the tactical level and then up to the strategic level and so at the operational level you've got the definers, producers and users at the tactical level you've got the subject matter experts. Sometimes the subject matter experts have the authority to be able to make decisions associated with their subject or their domain of data. If they don't have that authority or they don't feel comfortable in making the decisions for that data and it really is something that's cross-organization or strategic in nature what I find is that then the escalation goes from that tactical level of the domain stewards up to the strategic level which consists of your data governance council or your data governance committee. So typically if it's an issue just within a business unit those are typically solved within the business unit but if it's pertaining to data that impacts more than just a specific business function or business unit it gets escalated to the domain steward who again should have the opportunity to escalate it one step higher to the council. Typically we don't escalate data issues up to the executive level of the organization that data governance council is the highest level of escalation within an organization. Again feel free to jump in on any of these if you want to add anything there. I think we have time to add in a quick question here one more question Typically data stores report to data owners from form of council like a DG council or even working group. Those can be different escalation points. I'm reading your response from the other one sorry that's what I'm reading to see that's why I get confused let me comment on that so I don't necessarily always find that the data stewards report to the data owners I mean again the data owners I don't like that term I really think domain stewards or subject matter experts or something is more appropriate if you do have data owners in your organization then stewards are going to be reporting to multiple data owners depending on the types of data they use. I like to keep it instead of the operational level reporting to the tactical level they report to whoever they report to we don't need to change that we just need to help them to improve their relationship to the data. Let me sneak in one last question here to identify both the operations stewards and the domain stewards when assigning roles and responsibilities in the governance structure I would agree with that except for the word assigning because I mentioned that throughout the webinar I would not assign people into these roles I would recognize them based on their relationship to the data so the domain stewards, subject matter experts, they're already the people that you go to the operational people are the people that produce and use the data so it's not really a matter of assigning I would try to stay away from assigning using the verb assign because of what comes along with it. I agree that it's usually that the roles and responsibility in the data governance from a lot of them have already a lot of the activities have already been done they just need to be formally recognized you do the work already might as well take credit for it I like that idea very good I love it and so there's still a lot of questions we haven't had a chance to get to but just keep them coming in if you have additional questions I will get those over to Bob to get some answers for you that I will include in the follow up email on Monday so just a reminder I will send a follow up email with the links to the slides and the recording as well as a lot of the pieces that Bob shows throughout the presentation thank you everybody we hope to see you next month thank you to InfoJX for sponsoring today's webinar and help making these all happen we really appreciate it and thanks of course as always to our attendees in the great engagement we just love the way the community keeps going thanks everybody thank you