 Oh, hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of Data Diversity. We'd like to thank you for joining this Data Diversity webinar, taking an active approach to data governance. A look at how Riot Games implemented non-invasive data governance sponsored today by Elation. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, we will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we will 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 our highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag dataversity. And 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. And as always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the slides, to the recording of the session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me introduce to you our speakers for today, Chris Pudelka, Michael Leslie, Bob Seiner, and John Wills. Chris is the Data Governance Technical Product Manager at Riot Games. He studied psychology. I can talk today. Thanks guys. Psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and linguistics at Washington University in St. Louis and has a data engineering background. And Michael is a data management professional with over 20 years experience. He spent a majority of his career working in the finance industry out of Chicago, but made the move two years ago to focus on maturing the data governance program at Riot Games in California. And 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 Data Professional Award for significant and demonstrable contributions to the data management industry. Bob specializes in non-invasive data governance, data stewardship, and meta data management solutions. John is the VP of professional services at Elation with responsibility for service delivery, service portfolio development, and service partner enablement. John has 30 plus years of experience in data management with a number of startups and services providers. His senior leadership experience has been in the fields of data warehousing, BI, data integration, meta data governance, data profiling, and master data management. And with that, I will give the floor to John to get today's webinar started. Hello and welcome. Yeah, thank you, Shannon. Really appreciate that. Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone who's joined us on behalf of Elation, on behalf of Riot Games, on behalf of Bob Siner. We want to welcome everyone and thank you for spending your precious time with us today. I'm pretty sure that everyone's joined us because you know, we all share something in common, which is that we have a passion for data governance and we understand how important it is. You know, our point of view on this is that data governance is really critical. It's vital, more than just important. And that, you know, probably most of us, you know, face the challenge of our lifetime when it comes to data management, which is really establishing a culture, a data culture within our organization. It's more than establishing, but it's fostering and it's seeing it grow and it's seeing it expand and continually adapt and change and really fuel our businesses. So, we think it's right. We think it's important for us to spend this time together and again, really appreciate you joining us with a drill down on data governance and what's happening in the evolution of the implementation of data governance. And to that end, we see a very dynamic evolution of the implementation of data governance. We see it evolving from sort of its first wave of what I'll call sort of traditional implementation, which is centralized, you know, highly centralized command and control structure. And Bob will certainly fill us in more on that when we get to his part of the presentation. And we see it shifting. We see it shifting to sort of the second wave or the second phase of implementation, which is more about people, people-centric and community-driven, where there's lots of social interaction, collaboration, and you really get that crowd mechanism or crowd source mechanism. That's not to say that it happens, you know, in an anarchistic environment, right, by no means, right? Stewards really in this new evolutionary approach act as the guides, act as the moderators, as the coaches, using standards and policies. So that's an important part of it. But really the theme is, for the presentations you're going to hear today, is about people and an uplift from the crowd, if you will. So with that in mind, you know, we don't think that it's unusual that we would see this shift, this transition, this evolution. We've seen this in many other industries. And so to just call out one example, I'm sure many of you are familiar with, if you look in the segment of the print and encyclopedia industry, you notice on the left-hand side that the long-standing, venerable encyclopedia Britannica was in publication for 244 years. It wasn't only a few years after the introduction of Wikipedia that they went out of print. No one would have ever thought that that would happen, but it happened in a very, very short period of time. And so why was that? Well, we think in this industry, it was an example of the shift, the shift to crowd sourcing, where people didn't want to just be consumers, but people wanted to take their expertise, and they wanted to share their expertise, and they wanted to collaborate, they wanted to resolve differences in how people saw things. And they wanted to, and this doesn't, I took a screenshot here of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, because some people, if you're a casual user of Wikipedia, you don't realize that this is all being done with guardrails to ensure some level of standard and quality that's applied. So Wikipedia has policies and guidelines and moderators, all that good stuff, which again, I think is largely analogous to what I just talked about in terms of the evolution of governance and the participation of the crowd, of the larger body of the employee community in the environment. So to me, that's the perfect analogy of what's happening in our industry and space. So to further elaborate on these major themes, we have a really great lineup. Of course, you know Riot Games is going to lead us off, and I'll do a proper introduction in just a moment, but they're going to lead us off, and they're going to give you a practical example of a real-world example of how they're doing this and how they're using Bob Siner's non-invasive governance approach to do exactly that. Now, Bob, as Shannon gave a very great introduction of all of this, and I appreciate that, but many of you know Bob, and you know he's leading thinker on governance in space, leading writer, publisher, editor, TDAM newsletter, I think 24 plus years at this point, pretty amazing. And so Bob, after Riot Games, Bob is going to share more details on the approach and help us really ground ourselves in that approach. And then I'm going to come back for a very brief, fair-to-time, and I'm going to talk about the catalog platform and how the technology can enable all this to happen. So that's kind of our lineup, one, two, three, for the next few minutes together. Now Riot Games, just a few words that I don't want to scale Chris's thunder by any means, but just a few words. For those of you that are not familiar with Riot Games, Riot Games is a multi-billion-dollar business in a massive industry, the gaming industry. And if you have any doubts about that, just ask your kids, and they'll tell you. I asked my son, he was quite impressed probably for the first time on my career that I was doing a presentation. It was all because I was doing with Riot Games, so he's pretty excited. The thing about Riot Games is this dynamic industry they're in is moving so fast, it's absolutely reliant on data. So, you know, sort of our tagline to the seminar moving, you know, governance at the speed of gaming, it's absolutely positively true for this business. You know, they have these titles such as League of Legends, I'm sure many of you have heard of, and perhaps you can play it, Valorant, and many, many others. And the key thing about these games is they have to understand at a very fine grain what their user's like, what their user's interaction is like, in order to continually approve and maintain this leadership position. So, I'm excited, very excited to hear Chris and Michael who are leading their governance, their governance approach and their governance implementation to hear about how they're making that people-centric to, you know, to their employee community. So, with that, Chris, I think I'll turn it over to you and let's take it away. So, for those of you who don't know us, Riot was founded in 2006, and our mission really is to be the most player-focused game company in the world. And, you know, we try to live that every day. It's a critical value for us to think about player experience first. You know, it's so important, in fact, that we also, you know, we put our people first as well. It's important for us to enable the people that work at Riot Games who are very passionate about both the players and our games to be able to make good decisions for the player. You know, we thrive in a culture of a lot of autonomy and freedom because we want to be able to move quickly so that we can do the right thing for our players. We introduced League of Legends back in 2009. For those of you don't know League of Legends or maybe your kids play, it's an online PC game. There are about 140 or so characters that you can play in sort of a 5v5 fashion and it's played all over the world. And, you know, since we introduced it in 2009, it's been growing ever since. Year after year, we've just been really humbled by how much players have played our games and really given us a lot of great feedback. And we're really privileged to be able to say that we have 100 million monthly active players who play League, as it were. But it's not just League of Legends, right? The people who make up Riot Games and the people who make League of Legends, early on, we saw that there was a really big growing esports scene. And back in, I think it was 2010, we introduced the World Championships for League of Legends. And since then, we've had nine different seasons where people who play League of Legends professionally every year come together and compete for the World Championship. Last year, we actually had 44 million peak concurrent viewers of our World Finals. So, you know, since we introduced League, we've been doing a lot. We've been growing quite a bit and esports has really taken off for us. So we're doing a lot, not just on the game side and on the community side, but we're also doing a lot on the data side. In terms of some of the things that we do with data, you know, one of the important things that you might guess is because we update the game so frequently, we actually update the game about every two weeks or so, we're constantly adding new characters, updating their abilities. It's important for us to make sure that the game remains competitive and fair and balanced, both for our regular game and for our esports competitions. We also want to make sure that sportsmanship is encouraged. So we do things like reward and punish players for different behaviors, depending on the region they're playing in and the different languages that they're speaking. We also do things like we use machine learning to actually test and validate some of our product assumptions in our games before they reach the hands of our players. More recently, we've been incentivizing engagement with a lot of our content on third-party platforms like Twitch as well. So we'll do things like give players early access to our new games based on them watching streamers on a platform like Twitch. Also really important, you might guess, if you know anything about competitive gaming is that we're really serious about detecting and preventing cheating and hacking, and we use a lot of data to help drive that process. We also, one of the important things we do is we maintain, we call it like a low-latency gaming network. I think we call it Riot Direct, and it's about keeping the game experience very quick and snappy. So in terms of data challenges, a lot of the challenges that we face are technical in nature. You could probably guess, because we are operating the game globally at the number of players that we have, a lot of the demand that we have for up-to-date, relevant, accurate information is really challenged by those aspects of running the game globally. For us, the amount of information that we need, the number of decisions we're trying to make, that hasn't really been slowing down as League of Legends has been growing and as we've been expanding to more and more regions over time. So yes, we have a lot of technical data challenges for the technologies that we work with, but we also have a lot of data challenges that are related to data management. As I mentioned before, it was really important for us to be able to grow quickly as League of Legends grew and to enable our employees, we call them rioters, to enable rioters to make good decisions quickly for our players. Now over time as Riot grew as an organization and the number of players in our operations grew, a lot of informal channels for sharing information about data for data management, different processes, they started to grow. We grew a lot in terms of tribal knowledge, you might say. Now a lot of you can probably relate to this. So how many of you, for example, have ever found a Confluence page or a Google Doc? There was a data dictionary and the last time it was updated was two years ago or six months ago. How many of you have ever recently seen a question that was asked about some of your data where you know the answer it's been answered before in probably a Slack thread or an email thread and you know it's out there, you just don't know exactly where it's buried. These are the kinds of problems we have with our data management that you know, for example, our data warehouse team, they started out documenting a lot of their data in Confluence and as we introduced more and more data to the data warehouse and data was changing over time, the data dictionary and their documentation started to grow out of date and a lot of our other employees are using that data, they started asking questions on Slack. So over time, a lot of the answers were being found in Slack so the data warehouse team was giving updates and providing answers to questions in Slack. And so what we found is that the source of truth for what our data is and what it means and how do you best use it, it started to change. It's found in multiple places and it's really hard to understand all of that as it's changing. Now we love these tools, they're great for collaboration but they're not really perfect for data so that's really a challenge we've had. So I mentioned, you know, League of Legends has been growing, we've been humbled by this success we've seen and we've had these technical and data management challenges over time. For about 10 years, we were just League of Legends. That might sound surprising but yeah, we were a single game company. Last year, we like to say we started to put the S in Riot Games. Last year, we announced to our players that we're coming out with new titles. We've been working on a lot of really cool projects over the years and we're finally, we're so excited to finally tell players that yeah, we're actually going to be a multi-game games company. And so in about a 12 month period, players are going to start to see about four new titles. And for us, with all these challenges and with the culture of, you know, do what's right for the player, enable our employees with a lot of autonomy, the question for us really was, you know, how are we going to thrive in this kind of transformation? We still have these challenges and we're not slowing down. We're actually adding more platforms where players are going to play. We're adding new genres of games and we're also adding new types of ways to engage with our IP and with different media. So for us, it's a question of, you know, how are we going to thrive and how are we going to keep pace with the demand for good information? So we knew that central to that, central to thriving was having data that we could treat like an asset, to have data that's trustworthy, right? So for us, it was important for us to introduce data governance. Now, based on what I was talking about with our data management challenges, we actually selected Bob Sinner's non-invasive approach to data governance and he'll talk a little bit about that later. We selected it because for Riot, we had a lot of informal that we needed to move to formal. We had a lot of people who had key relationships to data that just weren't recognized at all. And we needed to select a framework that wasn't command and control and that wasn't just based on technology because we couldn't be disruptive. Not only could we not afford that as League of Legends continued to grow, but as we're transforming into this multi-game studio, we actually can't flow down. So we need something that keeps pace and doesn't really disrupt our existing process. Now, we also wanted to introduce a data catalog. We knew that we wanted to, we wanted something that could place a spotlight not only on what data we had, but also on our people. As I said, people are central to Riot Games, the organization. And so for us, finding the right technology and the right solution that kept up to date with all of our data, but also allowed people and stewards to shine really led us to Elation. And we picked Elation because it's very people-centric and that really resonated with us, especially given our culture. Of course, we needed Elation to work with our technologies, the places where we are hosting data. And so it was a really good fit for us. And we also wanted to make sure that a lot of the ways that we collaborated and the other tools, we found something that was better than what we were doing today. Something that, again, put a spotlight on both the data and the people and allowed them to collaborate together. Lastly, it was important for us to be able to measure the changes that, for data management, that when we were introducing Elation as a technology and non-invasive governance as a framework, we wanted to be able to see the impact and measure the changes of our data management behavior as well. So speaking about measurement, this here is a graph of our engagement with the data catalog over time. So in orange, you can see new users to the catalog. And in blue, you can see returning users to the catalog. Now, at first glance, this might look like a really great success story. It might look like, okay, engagement is growing, users are coming back. But in fact, this is only one small aspect of the big picture. So when we initially introduced Elation at Riot, we didn't really have a data governance framework or an approach to data governance to go with it. We introduced Elation as, you can think of it like a build it and they will come approach. We introduced it as part of our technology package, with other types of tools for working with data. And as you can see here in a sort of before and after picture, it wasn't really clear to us that we were going to get the value that we thought we would out of the data catalog with our current approach. And the future for us was kind of uncertain for the catalog. So you might be asking, okay, what did we do different? What changed? So with that, I'm actually going to hand it over to my colleague, Michael Leslie, who's going to explain a bit about what we did and what we're doing now with both non-invasive governance and Elation. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate that. Yeah, so as we look at this graph, I think it's a tale of kind of things that, you know, we didn't get right when we started this. And then things that we actually stumbled on a little bit when it comes to getting it right. We actually moved from this, if you build it, they will come approach to introducing non-invasive governance and taking a more active lead in managing the catalog. And where we focused first was really with our data privacy group. You know, we were working through GDPR compliance with our new games. It was very important to protect our players' right to know and right to be forgotten for GDPR. And we found some additional engagement out of this effort. But it really wasn't moving at the pace we wanted to. And it really, it wasn't until we looked at a vertical of information within Riot that we knew could be, where the value could be unlocked for a broad group of users that we really started to see the engagement ramp up. So this came in kind of concert. It was really fortunate. We had the State of the Warehouse group that was committed to building a cross-game data warehouse at Riot. Really important information about use, cannibalization, and revenue that was going to cross our games. But the value needed to be unlocked. So we worked with them. They were using confluence and, as Chris said, a mix of Slack channels and informal stuff, GitHub as a methodology to keep documentation. And we just shifted it or refocused that effort so that they would publish it into this centralized data catalog. And we standardized the way this documentation was presented. This had the effect of increasing the value of the information. So we got some stuff right in this phase. And now, next, what we're looking at is ways to bring this to the next level. And so this is a slide from our Riot Games data community practice. This is something that we do every Friday. This is one of the first times we presented. This is just not too long ago. We're trying, in this next phase, to drive home this idea that if you are a consumer, if you're a producer of information, or if you're a definer of information, that you're already a data steward. This good data stewardship role I know can be tough, like some people think it's a job. Some people don't. What at Riot we're doing, especially with this really ground up engaged culture, is building this idea that, hey, you're already doing this job already. You're already focused on documenting these things. You're already focused on answering stuff in Slack. Let's just formalize that and recognize you that you're already governing this data. So it's about focusing those efforts. And so what are people saying? What kind of response have we gotten? I'll take a minute on this slide to just have you read some of the comments, the anecdotes that we get. And really the themes of the responses that we're getting from our users is that in focusing their efforts, we're creating value within Alation, a centralized catalog, and that is really saving people time and saving people effort. We're all so busy that through the use of this tool, we can shave minutes off people's days. And that really makes a big difference. So for us looking ahead, this next phase, we're here to strengthen the engagement at the operational level, the lowest level within Riot. So ground up, we're working with our producers, our definers, our consumers to support this governance stewardship efforts. And then we're now through this groundswell, actually building a data council or looking to build a paid council at Riot for the first time. So a lot of governance programs, they think, wow, I need this big council and I need to have these group of leaders in place to do all this work. And for us, that has not been our experience. We haven't had that. We're building towards it. And we're still seeing engagement in the catalog. And we're seeing the value of data rise. And we think this is going to be our path. We know that other groups, people have a different path. But for us, this is ours. And with that, I will turn it over to Bob, who we love for his work in non-based day governance. Thanks. Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you very much, Chris and John. And of course, Shannon. It's great to be with all of you today. I'm really honored to be that my approach is being followed by companies that are really leading in their industries. And Riot Games is certainly one of those that is leading in their industry, as well as Alation in the data catalog field. And there's a lot of uses of the tool that can help to engage people and to get them very active, which is what Alation is stating, is the active data governance. The way we're going to get it active is by engaging the people of the organization. If you don't know much about me, I'm involved in the data governance industry in a lot of different ways through the publication that Shannon mentioned earlier, the data administration newsletter through KIK, consulting and educational services, KIK stands for Knowledge is King. And everybody's mentioned the non-invasive data governance book. And I've done webinars on that a lot with Data Diversity. I've written a lot about the subject on TDAN as well. So if you're interested in more information about non-invasive data governance, the people-oriented focus, the active approach through the people, please reach out to any of us. And we'll be glad to answer questions that you have about that. I want to talk a little bit about non-invasive data governance and the definitions that I use for specific terms that are being used throughout this webinar. If you look at the definitions, I don't want to read through each of them too specifically, but I kind of highlighted in red those things that are really important. I mean, data governance, no matter what approach you're going to take. And I'm going to talk about three different approaches here in a minute. But whatever your approach is that you take, you need to execute and enforce authority over the management of data. That's the whole idea of governance in the first place. If we can't follow the rules and get people to understand how the data should be used, build their confidence in the data, we're not really governing data the way that we need to in our organization. And Chris and Michael talked about the formalizing of accountability. There are already people in the organization that have the responsibility for defining and producing and for using data, as Michael spoke about. And data stewardship is really all about identifying who those people are and recording information about them. And certainly the Elation Data Catalog is a great place to house that information. But we want to make certain that we're formalizing the accountability by recording who these people are and making that information available to people across the organization, which really gets to the main use of the Elation Tool at Riot Games. And so when we're talking about metadata, it's basically it needs to be recorded somewhere in order for it to be useful to somebody. And the Data Catalog is a perfect place to be able to house that metadata and to make it available to people. And when we talk about non-invasive data governance, and again, I'll compare that to a couple different approaches in a couple seconds here. But it really describes the approach. How are we going to apply governance in the organization? Again, with the end game being that we want to execute and enforce authority. And we've found a formalized accountability for people across the organization. And if you've spent time on my webinars in the past, and if you've read things that I've written, I always talk about, I have two quotes that I use quite a bit. And the first one is, well, the data and the metadata are not going to govern themselves. People in the organization need to have the responsibility for governing the data and need to have the responsibility for governing the metadata. The data will not magically naturally govern itself. People are going to want to do what they want to do with the data. We want to get people to understand that what they do really matters. And getting those people active, getting those people to use the metadata in the catalog is certainly one of the ways that Riot Games has demonstrated improvements with governance as they've showed you in the graph that they shared. The other quote that I have known for saying all the time is that everybody is a data steward and that we need to get over that. And the fact is, if we only select a handful of people that are the stewards of the data, we're only going to cover a part of the organization. And the only true way to cover the entire organization is to recognize that anybody who defines, produces and or uses data as part of their job. And if we're going to hold them formally accountable for that relationship, they're data stewards. They can't opt in and opt out. They need to understand that what they do matters. And again, that is really the approach that Riot Games is taking is to get the people in the organization active in the governing of the data. So I want to share with you real briefly, and I could spend a whole lot of time on this slide, but don't really have the time to do that. This is a basic data governance framework. And I call it the non-invasive data governance framework because the version on the right hand side of the screen shows how you would fill in, how you would address each of those core components across the top with each of the different levels of the organization and the levels being the executive, strategic, tactical, all the way down to the support level. But we've got to focus on those core components of governance in order to make certain that we're going to be successful. We need to address the data. We need to address the roles. So we need to address processes, communications, metrics, and specifically the tools that we're going to use to get people to become active and to leverage the data and to build out the metadata in the way that we need to in order to provide a completely governed environment. So what I want to do is I've shared this framework with you. Please let us know if you're interested in seeing this framework, but it helps you to assure yourselves that you're going to cover each of those core components across the top at each of the different levels. If you look at the roles column on the right hand side, you can see we have an executive steering committee. We have a council. We have data domain stewards and owners and we have stewards of the data. So that's just one example of how to fill out the framework to use that to make certain that you're addressing all the parts of a data governance program that you need to. And I wanted to share with you for a couple minutes here how people are implementing or why people are implementing data governance. And I always start out with a lot of the organizations that I work with to define a purpose statement. So when people ask you, what are you doing? Why are you governing your data? What's the purpose of data governance in your organization? Well, it can be to improve data quality, to improve protection, ownership, understanding, access. It could be something else altogether different, but it makes sense to have a purpose statement so that you can say, we're looking to provide confidence in strategic data. We're looking to protect the data that's classified and that's considered to be sensitive. We're looking to make certain that we know who all of the owners of the data are, the owners of the systems and the processes and things like that. So there's a lot of different reasons why organizations put governance programs in place. It's very important for most organizations to be able to answer that question quickly and to be able to state what is the purpose of the governance program within their organization. And as I mentioned before, and I know that Chris and Michael mentioned it earlier as well, there are a couple different approaches, actually three different approaches to data governance. And I'm really happy to hear the wording that Chris and Michael used when they described the approach before it started to take off. And let me go through them real quickly. There's the command and control approach, which sounds like somebody is speaking from above, thou shalt govern the data. And then there's kind of the traditional approach, which is if we build it, they will come. That's kind of like the movie field of dreams, if you think about it. And you build a program, you build out the rules and you hope that people are going to gravitate towards your governance program. The noninvasive approach takes a really a completely different, some people may say 180 degree different view on the command and control approach. And at least the 90 degree view of the traditional approach, which it starts with the premise of the fact that you're already governing data. There's already people in the organization that are stewards, even though we may not have fully recognized or formalized who they are, there are people in the organization that are governing the data and that are stewarding the data. The problem is that they're doing it inefficiently, they're doing it ineffectively. And mostly that's because they're doing it informally. And if we can formalize the approach, that's going to feel a lot less threatening to people in the organization. So personally, obviously, I like the idea of staying noninvasive in your approach to data governance. Now what I want to do is I want to highlight what's the difference between these three different approaches and why these the different approaches might fit for your organization. Certainly you can do a hybrid of these approaches. But let's just talk about from these different perspectives, from these different components of the framework that I shared with you earlier, how is it different for command and control versus traditional versus invasive? And I've tried to summarize it on the right hand side of the screen, which is in the not in the command and control approach, we're going to assign people into roles. And I think from what John had said earlier, or Chris and Michael had said, we recognize that we don't really need to assign people because they're already doing it. What we need to do is help them to understand what role they play. And then a traditional approach, we're going to identify people into the roles. And that's good. I mean, we can start to identify who does want with the data across the organization. But it will really help if we would take an approach where we would recognize people into the roles. And there's a positive connotation that comes from recognition. So the difference between assign and identify and recognize really in a core way spells out the differences between the three approaches. Again, with the three approaches, as regards to the process components, a lot of organizations think that the data governance will be all new processes if you're following a command and control approach. And the truth is, there's already levels of governance taking place in your organization. We don't need to define everything as being new. What we want to do is we want to make sure that we're getting engaging the appropriate people at the appropriate time in the appropriate way and utilize some of the processes we already have in the organization. And then there's the traditional approach, which there's a single process, the data governance process. That's my pet peeve. I think that there's a lot of different governing processes. And in the non-invasive approach to processes, we're focusing on applying governance to the processes. So not necessarily redefining each of the processes, but applying governance and getting the right people involved at the right time for the right reason within your organization. From the communications perspective, or from the core components of communications, there's a big difference between these approaches as well. And the command and control approach, you're going to tell people, you will do this. No matter how busy you are, you will do this, and you will follow the rules. And that feels invasive. People are already busy 100% of the time. It's not a greater amount than that. In the traditional approach, we tell people, you should do this. There's not necessarily any oomph behind it. How do you like that as a technical term? But there's no real, there's nobody standing behind the program. We're saying you should do this. In the non-invasive approach, the whole concept is you're already doing this. And we're going to put an approach together that helps you to recognize who's already governing data and help them to help the organization to govern the data better. And again, that goes back to what Riot Games said, is the way that they feel about implementing governance in the organization. And last of the comparisons that I want to make is in the tools. And oftentimes in organizations, they purchase first, or they already have tools. And that's not necessarily, we're being forced now to use the tools that we have, rather than looking to, at first, let's leverage what tools we have within our environment. But if we have requirements that aren't being addressed by those tools, let's go out and look at other tools, tools like elation in the data catalog field, to make certain that you have the data, you have the structure and everything in place, metadata that you need in order to be successful with your program. So I'm just going to summarize real quickly on two slides. What makes non-invasive data governance different? And what makes it better? Well, it might be better for some organizations. Other organizations may not look at it that way. But the first thing is we're going to formalize accountability. A lot of organizations think of data governance as being over and above the normal work efforts and existing and threatening to the culture. They think about data governance as needing to be about command and control. And they also think that it's going to be invasive. It's going to be threatening to the people and the work culture of the organization. Well, the truth is it doesn't have to be that way. There are alternative approaches and non-invasive data governance is one of those approaches that you can follow or is the approach that I suggest you follow if you want to leverage existing levels of accountability within your organization. So in the non-invasive approach, you know, people are identified and recognized. They're formalized and they're engaged. This is truly the way, the quickest way to add value for governance to your organization. It augments and supports all of the different work that you've done in your organization. There is governance taking place. I can almost assure you that if you have information security, if you follow business rules, there's already governance taking place. Let's leverage these things for the betterment of the organization. And we make certain through our communications that we assure that senior management understands what we're doing and that we communicate effectively the different approaches that we're using or the different methods that we're using to socialize data governance within the organization. So non-invasive data governance is a frictionless approach. It's less threatening. You're already governing your data, recognizing formalized accountability, all of these things. It's just a practical way of implementing governance by starting with what you already have in the organization. So what I'd like to wrap up before I turn this back over to John is just to talk to you real quickly about how organizations are using data catalogs and how they're incorporating those into the data governance solution. So in the data intelligence solutions, people are documenting things in the resources that they're applying resources and investing in, documenting the data warehouse, the data lake, whatever analytical platforms you're building. If you're doing data quality, organizations are using data catalogs to formalize your business rules and your standards and your domains or acceptable values in protection solutions. It's documenting and recording the information about how the data can be handled and how the data is classified is very important. And the last three types of solutions I want to talk about are data integration solution where data is being combined and we're looking to integrate data and use data in different ways across the organization and capturing information that will let people know what data is available to them, what inventory of data you have, who's accountable for that data, any data sharing agreements, you know, how people use the data. And most importantly, a lot of organizations are looking to implement data governance and data catalogs to improve their data understanding solutions. And I think everybody so far on the call has alluded to the fact that data governance is really a behavioral issue. It's a behavioral issue when it comes to the way that people behave with the data across the organization. So I hope that the comments that I've made on the non-inducing data governance approach have been helpful. And with that, I would like to turn it back over to John. Yeah, thank you, Bob. Appreciate that and wonderful presentation. Chris and Michael, also wonderful presentation. I think every time I work with you guys, I learn a few new things and it's just amazing. It's it's layered very deep. And so for the audience, I think what I'm going to do now is, you know, we can't do justice to the entire platform, you know, catalog platform formulation in five minutes or so. But I can give you kind of a sneak peek and kind of directionally help you understand what technology we have that helps you implement the approach that Bob's drilled that into and that Michael and Chris have talked about. So that's going to really be my goal. And we certainly invite you to follow up with us and we can go into any depth that you'd like in terms of a demo or what, you know, on our approach or anything else. So with that in mind, let me just spend three or four minutes and give you a sneak peek and then we'll open it up to questions and answers. So our approach is, as you would expect, very close to the line with Bob's. We do have kind of a prescriptive path for implementing our platform, our catalog platform for non-invasive and active governance. Just in brief and step one and two, you're sort of starting up and you're setting your policies and your standards, naming conventions, descriptions, quality, timeliness, completeness and so forth. And you're, you've got those stored in your catalog and you're, and then you're looking at different domains or business units or functions. So you have a scoped area. That's in number two. And then you're starting what I call the virtuous cycle, right? The never-ending, always-growing, expanding, enriching and deepening cycle. That starts with number three. You're always ingesting new assets. And for us, you know, we talk about assets and asset types. It's not just schemestables, columns, files and file sources. It's business terms, business metrics, things like policies. I've already mentioned API endpoints. It's, there's a whole rich array of cataloged asset types. So we're always ingesting those. And then you're going through a process. I love Bob's word where he says, you know, you're, you're recognizing people into their role. So number four is about really having some intelligence about these assets you're ingesting as part of what the platform gives you, some intelligence and who the top users are and most popular assets. And so now you can distribute that to the community, if you will. People that are the experts and have them be recognized into their role of helping raise the quality and the standards of the metadata and the data. So that really takes, takes place at number five. I'd say also at number five, you know, people want to do the right thing. We have a very positive view of, of, of people and that people want to do the right thing. And if they're educated on the policies and standards back in that we're defined in the startup phase, people will, will generally do the right thing. So now in number six, you kind of unleash the crowd and the crowd is curating using the data. I love how Bob says it's part of their normal process. So that's kind of, that's kind of baked in. And in number seven, stewards, stewards in this, in this, in, in, you know, in this environment, stewards are really not gatekeepers, but they're the guides, the mentors, the coaches. So they're able to have a series of reports. They can monitor what's happening. And then there's a very social collaborative aspect in number eight for communicating, discussing, resolving issues and so forth. And then of course, the line goes from seven back to three because the world is in static. New assets are always coming in assets are changing. Right. So that's why I call it the virtuous cycle. It's actually a cycle loop within a loop for those of you that, that notice. Let me flash some screenshots at you real quick and just make a couple comments and then we'll head towards the wrap up. Here's just a sneak peek at what we mean when we say, you know, use Bob's term, the recognition of people. When you're bringing assets in, one of the things the platform does is it identifies. It gives you insight about those. So it tells you things like in the lower right hand corner of the screenshot, the popularity of your assets. If these assets have been ingested before, what level of curation has been achieved with those, which is kind of the bar chart looking orange bars there. And then an assign me button. So you see the assign me. So you can assign this out to groups. You know, again, the experts who've been recognized just assign those out. This is a manual assignment button. We have mass assignments as well to really help you scale up and do that. The next screenshot is really, you know, just at the point of curation for people that have, you know, the permissions to do so, they can surf through navigate through the policy assets that have been cataloged and they can cross associate this screenshot little screenshot on the left here is, is a screenshot of a catalog page for a schema level object. And so they can cross associate policies with this, this particular schema and notice how they're color coded. Also, there's a little lighter yellow colored box at the top that's kind of says warning in it. That's our flagging capability where you can flag objects at any level. You can endorse them, right? Kind of it's kind of like your idea of giving it an upvote or downvote. You can endorse it, put comments in there. In this case, when someone chooses a policy object, it actually gets hyperlinked and tagged right into that. I'll show you why on the next, in the impact of that on the next screenshot or at least one of the impacts. This next screenshot, you know, one of the aspects of the catalog is that it allows users to actually work with the data. So the catalog comes with a tool called compose, which is a query tool. So, I mean, you don't have to use it, but a lot of our customers most do choose to use it because they don't want the catalog just to be a great documentation tool. They want it to be a tool that leads people to the answer of the right data, understand it, and then actually be able to use the data without flipping out to some, you know, some other environment. So when you're using compose to write your queries and you drag that schema out, the one we're just looking at, or you drag a table out or anything that has policy attached, the standard attached, then notice that little salmon colored box right in the middle. So as you're dragging the schema out of the table, it's active, it's aware at the point of data use. And it shows you, oh, these policies are actually attached to the schema. So as a user, you can use the hyperlink, go off, look at the policy, understand what you're supposed to be doing with the data or not supposed to be doing with the data to make sure that you're, you know, you're aligned with, with the policies. Last example I'll show actually second to last, I mentioned that, you know, steward in the role of guide coach or mentor needs this ability to monitor and see, well, how are we actually doing against our, our standards for quality, both the metadata and data. And so there's a subcomponent of the platform called elation analytics that gives you the ability to drive these types of reports visualization dashboarding for, for the steward. And then last there's this, this conversation capability. So in the right hand side of the screenshot, it's a, you know, you can open up a conversation on any object in the catalog. And you can assign that to a person or to a group, you can, you know, just start having a back and forth conversation, you can at mention other objects, you can at mention other people, stewards. And it's a great place to just have this social dynamic can be one on one, it can be, it can be with groups, and it really helps to resolve issues, answer questions. It allows everybody to, you know, kind of have this uplift of dialogue specifically about the data and the other assets, where those assets live, as opposed to email threads that, you know, aren't really attached to the data and other tools that, you know, that you can have conversations in, but they're not really on the data element itself. And there's all kinds of notification abilities and inbox capabilities that notify you and pop up and put watches on these things and all kinds of all kinds of cool capabilities to stay socially plugged in with what's happening. So that's a little sneak peek. I'll leave it at that. I really appreciate, you know, Chris and Michael, thank you very much. And Bob, I really enjoyed the presentations. I want to thank the audience. We are going to go into Q&A, but I do want to take this opportunity to thank the audience again for being with us today. We hope you found this useful. And we always enjoy spending time with people that share our deep interest and passion for data governance. So thank you very much. So Shannon, I think I'll turn it back over to you. And I think you're going to, you'll host our Q&A session, correct? Yes, John. Thanks so much. And I echo that sentiment. Thanks to all of our speakers today for this great presentation. And if you have questions for any of our speakers, feel free to submit them in the bottom right hand corner of your screen in the Q&A section. And just to answer the most commonly asked question, just a reminder, I will send a follow-up email to all registrants by end of day Thursday with links to the recordings, links to the slides. And I will include links to Bob's frameworks for you all since you've been asking for that. So diving in here, guys. And Bob, this came up when you were talking, so let's start with you. It seems like this is a different cultural approach to using data and sharing results. Can you talk about the cultural aspects of non-invasive data governance? Well, yeah, I'd love to talk about it. The cultural aspect of it is very important. I mean, if people aren't already busy, people already have day jobs. That's the term that I hear in quotes all the time, that they have day jobs. And if they're assigned into a new role, immediately it's going to feel as though that's over and above what they're presently being asked. So it's going to impact the culture of the organization by people who are already probably overstressed, overworked, maybe not overworked. I don't know, but people that already have a large number of responsibilities, that all of a sudden you're giving them more responsibilities. And the idea of being non-invasive is to recognize that they're already doing some of these things and to formalize it. How do we formalize it? By recording it somewhere where people can get access to it and say, oh, I've got a question about this type of data, I'm going to call Michael about that. Because his name is listed as being the quote-unquote owner of that data. So non-invasive in the culture is really important. We want to make certain that, and that is the reason why a lot of organizations that follow the non-invasive data governance approach is because they say that's the only approach that's going to be accepted by the culture. We don't want, yes, we want to change the culture to the point where people understand the role that they play with the data, but we don't want it to feel threatening to them. So that's a great question. I appreciate that question. Anybody else want to weigh in on that? I'm sure you guys can hear me. Definitely speak to that from the Riot Games perspective. When we're talking about data governance and talking about data stewardship at Riot, that's one of the things that we always have to be careful to make sure that we're clear about what that means, that we're not saying, this is, and I put this in chat, we're not trying to add a new process, especially for our software engineers when we're working with them and data engineers. That's a kind of a scary phrase to utter and for them to hear. And we're really sensitive to that. And we're trying to, the shift to, hey, this isn't a new process. We're actually trying to recognize what you already do is a big deal for us, because recognition is also culturally important for us at Riot as well, not just in the data governance sense, but just in terms of allowing our coworkers and other employees at Riot to recognize how awesome a job people are already doing on a day-to-day basis. So it was really great to see that expressed in Bob's framework for us. Non-invasive data governance, what is the equivalent to escalation for issues that are beyond the capability of an individual? Well, the equivalent of escalation in non-invasive data governance is its escalation. It is when we have an issue that pertains to data within a specific business area, we want to get the stewards of that data within that business area involved in the discussion and the decisions that we're going to make. However, when it now starts to cross over business units within the organization, we need to have a formal process to escalate that up from the operational level that's just in the line of business or in the business unit to more of a subject matter expert or a subject area person who has the responsibility for that data across the organization. Now, sometimes the people at that level have the authority to be able to make decisions on the data. Sometimes they don't. If they don't have the authority to make the decisions, then we need to have a way to be able to escalate that up to the strategic level of the organization, which is the Data Governance Council. So when we say what's the equivalent to escalation, if it's outside of an individual person's responsibility, the idea is to take it through a formal channel to find the process for escalating issues and getting decisions made. And that would typically be from the operational level, business unit specific, to the tactical level, which is now looking at across business units, to the strategic level, which is what we usually have a Data Governance Council or a similarly named group for. So it is escalation. I mean, that is the name I use for it, and it is the appropriate name. Yeah, just like to add a little bit there. You know, I think that one of the opportunities that the catalog provides is the ability to have transparency. Some of these escalations and these resolutions can take quite a while. So what are your users do while this debate goes on about something? I mean, our perspective on this is the catalog, you don't have to do this, but the catalog gives you the ability to work in the clear, to work in the open and be transparent. So if you have the ability to actually cross associate objects and then use a Wiki-like page to actually say that the status is it's an escalation, and here's why. So people can continue to at least have knowledge and understanding what's happening instead of it feeling like, you know, the magic's all happening, you know, somewhere behind the scenes, and it's unclear. So I think that's a really, you think transparency and the topic of literacy and the topic of governance to me all are closely associated, and I think that's a great opportunity. And I will add on to this because I think you touched on something, John, that's important is that for us, and Chris had mentioned this in our talk that we had this term rioter for our employee, getting to consensus across the organization, it's a global organization where rioter is sometimes equivalent to employee comes with it's a really loaded definition as we, you know, cross into international ideas of what employee means and things like that. So it took us six to nine months to come to a consensus using this kind of bottom up approach to data governance. We think it could have been faster with a data council, but the way riot works in our culture, that was the way that we got that term defined. And there was a lot of escalation that happened, but it was managed through the leads of those operational groups, coming together to decide that they were going to change their system to align with the definition. So it's important that governance is a very, it's a long term investment in the value of data. And sometimes the road to get there is can be difficult. And it's important to celebrate the small wins as your operational data stewards align with these definitions over time, because it won't happen all at once. Well guys, that does bring us to the top of the hour here. Thank you so much again for this great presentation. And thanks to our attendees for being so engaged in everything we do. Again, a reminder, I will send a follow up email by end of day Thursday with links to the slides, the recording and the additional information requested, including Bob's matrices. There's a lot of product request questions in here that I'll get over to you guys at Elation. Make sure we get those answers for everybody. Again, thank you so much, everybody. Hope you all have a great day and stay safe out there. Thanks guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody.