 Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Executive Editor of Dataiversity. We'd like to thank you for attending Enterprise Data Governance Online, the first ever virtual conference produced by Dataiversity. We've been very excited to spend the day with you and kick off the 2016 year with this new event. We hope you have thoroughly enjoyed the lineup of sessions so far for you today. And of course a special thanks to all of our sponsors who helped make it all happen. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, he will be muted during the event. For questions, please use the group chat. If you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights of questions via Twitter using hashtag E-B-G-O. Slides and recordings of the presentation will be made available to all registrants following the event. Now let me introduce to you our final speakers for today, Kimberly Navala and Brie Bach, whom I affectionately refer to as the Dynamic Duo. They are great speakers individually, and together they are most certainly a force of education. Today they will be discussing from agreement to engagement this role of story and data governance. To give you a brief background, Kimberly is the Director of Business Strategies at SAS. She is responsible for industry education, key client strategies, and market analysis in the areas of business intelligence, analytics, data governance, and master data management. She has over 15 years' experience advising clients on the development and implementation of strategic customer and information management programs and managing mission-critical projects. Brie is a transmedia mastermind, the storyteller at SAS. For Brie, it's all about telling the right story. She works closely with other thought leaders to build concepts and make complex ideas easy to understand as she develops and delivers a variety of transmedia projects, bringing our stories to life one prezzy presentation, interactive workshop, and engaging video at a time. With that, and you both have a blog series on the university, you can check out as well. I will give the floor to Brie to get the session started. Hello and welcome. Thanks, Shannon. Thanks for that great introduction. And thanks, everybody, for joining Kimberly and I for a discussion about the role of story and data governance. We're going to chat about why data governance and data stewardship is prime for storytelling. We're going to talk about why story matters and how it works. And we're also going to talk about how story moves us from engagement, excuse me, from agreement to engagement. And then we're going to end with some points to ponder. So just to kick us off, as Brie and I have turned our attention to the idea of story and data governance, it has become quite apparent that stories are already prevalent in the data governance space. And as a consultant and advisor to many companies, I've heard many, many of them over the years. And the problem is they tend to sound something like this. Kimberly, you've never seen a stalemate like this. The vote was 6-4 and 1 against and the 1-1. This came from a client who was explaining how a key business decision was deadlocked due to his company's culture of consensus and therefore, why getting people to agree, much less to act on key data strategies, was unlikely to ever work. Now, those of you who've been in the space for any period of time can very likely fill in your own versions of this story. And they most often end with some variation of dot, dot, dot. And that's why data governance is a dirty word. Or that's why data governance doesn't or won't ever work here. One particularly memorable individual went so far as to punctuate the point by telling me the proof was in the binder. And he then dramatically dropped a dusty three-inch binder filled with detailed data governance procedures and processes that the previous team, with the pleasure of, was given the mandate of implementing data governance, had created. And that the whole organization was actively in the process of ignoring, so point taken. And a great what not to do story was in fact born. Now, all of this is just really my long way of saying this, that when it comes to story and data governance and data stewardship, the question really isn't does story matter? The real question is what stories are you telling that are sticking in your organization here? And if we want to get more engagement in the data governance and stewardship process, we really need to tell more and better stories. And that answer to the question of what stories are we telling really does become more important as your program starts to grow and mature. Because in the very early days of most data governance and data stewardship programs, we're focused on fairly targeted activities, things like assessing and addressing discrete data quality problems, looking at defining data standards and guidelines. And those might include things like data access and security policies. And we start to dip our toe into collaborating with different users on data issues and identifying where data risks exist in the organization. But again, these activities tend to be very targeted and are often enforced in very discrete projects. So while participants may not like it, they will regularly participate as that participation tends to be very clearly mandated and surrounded within the constraints of a project or program. But the question then is what happens when the project is over? And we then also have to look at over time, our focus really tends to need to change towards more proactive endeavors. And if we want to increase both maturity and scope of our program and take on more proactive work, like being able to inform data strategies by trying to foster more data advocacy and literacy, and ultimately creating an audience that is both proactive and able to identify opportunities, not just to correct data problems, but to actually identify opportunities to use data more effectively and actually create value to capitalize or monetize on that data, we have to turn our attention to developing this sort of data self-awareness and literacy. And the way that we actually then start to do that is through telling stories. I will say here that I want to give a nod out, because we have generally overall gotten better as organizations and as data governance stewards working in the space about tying the lack of data governance and data management to bottom-line impact. So this is a good example here on this slide where we can see that the lack of good data governance, we've been able to actually tie it to an ability or an inability to appropriately service customers and dollars that are lost in both revenue and costs created by service areas. Being able to tie data to increased risk or inability to meet compliance requirements. And this is all very much a step in the right direction, but identifying these kind of impacts alone is not enough. The truth here is that no one is going to disagree with the fact that data is important when we present them with these types of facts. But the real question is, will they engage in the conversation and be active participants in addressing data issues outside of a discrete mandate? Kimberly makes really great points, and that's one of the reasons I love Annette Simmons' quote here. Being right has lost its luster. Like any good scientist, you have gathered data that proves being right doesn't mean people listen to you. But the question is why? And it's because facts alone aren't enough. If what you're trying to do is deliver reports, does it need to be wrapped in a story? Probably not. You can probably gather the data and hand it off and go about your business. But if what you're trying to do is motivate, inspire, and empower, facts can't do that by itself. What's interesting, however, is the skill of storytelling comes naturally to us. If you think about Monday mornings in the break room, you're not going through a laundry list of all the chores and honeydews you did over the weekend. You're probably sharing stories about kids' soccer games, parties you went to, maybe you bought a new car, or even highlights from the game on Sunday. Stories matter because you have to find a way to connect with those people. It's a way to get them to care. I just finished this really good book by Dan Roem. It's his latest book, and it's about storytelling for business. You may recognize his name from the book, Back of the Napkin. In his new book, he spends time helping his readers understand the wide behind story. And one of the examples he uses is the glass of water. So I'm going to borrow it for our purposes here to help you understand why change is so hard for us. I'm going to show you three truths about this glass. Truth number one, it's the facts. This much of the glass, it holds water. This much of the glass, it holds air. It's true, the data is accurate, but is it moving? Is it motivating? Does it cause you to want to do anything? Probably not. Truth number two is tied to logic. Me being an optimist, I drank half the glass, and so me being an optimist, I'm excited because the glass is still half full. I still have half a glass before I have to walk to the refrigerator and get more water. The pessimists in the audience, however, have a different perspective. They see this glass as half empty. Three, you just told us you drank half the glass, so obviously the glass is half empty. Truth number three is if you want people to see it your way, you need to give them a reason to care. I personally believe this glass is half full. So if I tell you it's half full, will you believe me? The data about this story can be changed because the truth is data can change. It changes and evolves as parameters and requirements change us. Our logical side needs to make sense of what we see, so it's a little slower to bring around to the truth, which means our head is slow to change. But our heart, like they say, the heart wants what a heart wants. So you have to give someone a reason to believe. The skill of storytelling relies on all three of those to move the audience towards change. This is why I'd like to share this quote from Dan's book. If I tell you the truth, if I tell it with a story, and if I tell that story with pictures, I can keep you glued to your seat. People need to trust, trust you. They need to trust your data. They need to trust your logic in order to become motivated to move. The other point he makes is that I need to show you through pictures. These are the cues that our brain needs to follow you. Words you use, images you use, or data visualizations are all great ways to display those pictures. So if I go back to the glass metaphor for a second, when I showed you the glass, you could trust my data because you could clearly see how much water the glass had. The optimist trusts my logic. Even the pessimist could follow my logic, albeit they're still hanging out there waiting for me to give them a reason to believe. And that's where story comes in. So what do stories do? Stories create connection points. And when you do it right, it helps create those connection points that puts you on common ground and makes you relatable. Dan uses the glass metaphor, which makes his content relatable. And as you saw by my use of it, it makes it shareable. He's created that engagement through the use of that story. Finding connection points are the why I should care as an audience part of storytelling. And nothing, there is nothing more intriguing than the internal question that we struggle with, what's going to happen next? We all want to know how that story ends, and it's why we'll sit through the worst movies all the way to the end because we want to know how that story is going to end and hopefully on a better net than when it started. The next part is... Yeah, go ahead, Kimberly. I just want to extend on an appointee made in terms of that stories allow people to engage in the conversation, because even with that very simple metaphor of the glass, it's sort of a rather interesting, I think, display of a chronic timing. Last weekend, someone sent me a cartoon, and the cartoon essentially said, a optimist sees the glass half full, a pessimist sees the glass half empty, and a realist adds a shot of whiskey to my sense of cheers. Now, I'm not advocating drinking here, but the point is that a really good story allows an audience, whether it's an internal audience or an external audience, our customers and our partners, to actually engage in and internalize the story to make it relevant for themselves. And so what we've noticed is, ultimately, the extent to which positive data stories abound and are shared within your organization is the extent to which data awareness has become embedded in your organization's culture. Exactly. Which brings us to the next one, and it's a great segue, Kimberly. It's that stories enable those teaching moments. If you think about how hard it is to learn something new without instruction or direction, whether it's a skill or a behavior you're asking them to adopt, stories will help you get them to see where you need them to go, especially if you use imagery. That's why video format has become such a popular way to sell stories or tell stories. It's because those stories inspire us and empower us and motivate us to try it ourselves. Basically, what I'm saying is that you want to show them how that behavior will, or you want them to see how that behavior is going to result. Is it going to improve that customer experience perhaps? Yeah, and again, there's a quote, and there's multiple versions of it, and it's attributed to different speakers. And I think this version is attributed to all in Cosgrove, and it's methods are many, principles are few, methods often change, but principles never do. And the truth for us when we're dealing with data is that there is way too much data. There are way too many business processes and systems that use that data for any one individual, or even a small army of stewards to be able to really identify where it all lives, to track it, much less to be able to codify every rule about that data one by one. And it's increasingly complicated by something that you mentioned before, Brie, and that's the fact that our environments also are changing constantly. So all of those facts and data drivers we use to engage people are going to change over time. So if we do this right and use story appropriately, we have a mechanism now to communicate some of the key data principles that we wish people to adopt without us having to try to identify and codify every rule or situation that's going to occur. So said differently, if we do this right, we can use story to demonstrate the types of behaviors and the outcomes we want to create, and if people can then understand those principles and behaviors, they can independently adopt their data practices to fit, even as the environment around them changes. Exactly. So the next piece is that stories remove that complexity. Let's face it, life is complicated, and it's why stories resonate so well with us, because it removed that complexity of a subject and gifts the audience what they need to overcome those obstacles by creating a clear path towards understanding. Metaphors, those are my favorite way to do this. I asked my boss one time how she helps companies understand that data is a corporate asset, because it is a hard sell when many see it as nothing more than a commodity. Their belief is that data is a commodity and not necessarily an asset. So she shared a really cool metaphor with me, and it kind of goes like this. Data is to accompany what trucks are to UPS. The fleet is an asset without which UPS cannot do business. Data is an asset without which a company cannot succeed without analytics. And for me, that places it in a completely different light, because how would UPS run their business without their fleet? This same can be said for data. Without data being an asset, companies couldn't make important decisions about their business. So here's a simple visual that walks you through how stories work. It connects the dots for your audience. Stories connect those dots for your audience and frames the conversation. And then it fills in the context people need to understand when you need to understand what you're asking of them. It makes your vision clearer. Kimberly, do you have something to add to for that one? Yeah, I think one of the things that I've observed is that as data professionals, we come to be very good at explaining the impact of data on very discrete or independent bits of the business, if you will. Yes, that's my technical term. But what we're not always so good at is demonstrating our understanding of how an individual can do that at a department, a system, or a person functions and how they might be impacted by that same environment and the changes we are asking them to make. So one of the things that story allows us to do is just like you connected the dots and colored in the lines here, is provide a context for the data conversation that everybody can relate to, and hopefully that everybody can relate to in their own way. It helps us make it personal. Perfect. So I'm going to share with you a quick little example of what I'm talking about. And I'm going to relay a few hard facts about banks and they're based on the global financial inclusion database. In 2014, there was nearly 9.6 million U.S. households that are unbanked. That is, they don't use a bank. Instead, they rely on alternate financial services like check caching, payday loans, and rent to own. According to the inclusion database, slightly less than half, 45.9% unbanked households were previously banks. A lot of great information. If you're trying to help a bank understand a need, it's great data. But what's it missing? There's no context for why all these people left a bank or why any bank should care or even what should they do about the unbanked households. You've got to start with why. So I'm going to try this again. And this time, I'm going to give you the why. I'm going to add a persona and a call to action because all these things you want to include in any story. As a banking industry, we need to understand why 9.6 million U.S. households would turn from traditional banking towards check caching, payday loans, and rent to own options. Would you be surprised to hear that it's due to life events like the shift in the job market? We probably all know someone who's gone through a significant life change. And because of that loss of income, it made people feel like they couldn't support or sustain a bank account. Others, frankly, they bailed over concerns of trust, privacy, and customer service. Business Insider tells us that four out of five of the lease-like brands are banks. Financial services is the third least popular industry ahead of tobacco and firearms. And most people would rather go to the dentist than interact with the bank. In other words, Mark, a front-line cook at a restaurant, gained new employment. He gained new employment and he'd rather pay payday loans from a check caching service than sign up for free checking account with seamless direct deposit because doing business with a local bank is just too painful. So how do you turn that around? You change the way you do business. For banks, it comes down to three key areas, transparency, nurturing growth channels, and building brand advocacy. To regain trust, you need transparency, whether it's about fees, security, privacy. The better you communicate with customers, the more confident they feel about the services you offer. When it comes to nurturing growth channels, as bank technologies continue to evolve, it's important to continue tracking and engaging with customers in order to meet their needs and the way they choose to do business with you. Maybe Mark relies heavily on public transit to get around and he doesn't have a location close by, so you need to make some tweaks to your mobile app in order to offer services Mark would benefit from. And with advocacy comes value. Reality is, people do business with people they like, so the more you can do to gain trust and improve customer experience, the more likely you are to create brand advocates, and those are the people you want to do business with. So why did I go through all this with you? It was to show you how different information becomes when you add context, when you make it personal by adding a persona, and how adding a call to action creates that clear path to understanding of what needs to be done. Now I'm going to share a personal example because I want to show you how emotion is tied to our decision making. Again, life is complicated. So is selecting a builder. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of building a house from the ground up, but it's a decision that I recently made and I wanted to quit before I got started. There are so many details involved, like doors and floors and cabinets. What countertops do I want? Don't even get me started on the windows. You've got deposits and upgrades and timelines and lenders, and all of that varies by builder. I was so overwhelmed by the entire process, I wanted to give up until I decided to visit one last spec house. Before we jumped into the builder's car to drive to that spec house, she began asking me questions about me and about my lifestyle and what's important. And then she used that information to tell me a story. As she walked me through different rooms in the house, she would stop and use that information and relay a story of how she saw me living in that space. For instance, I want to foster animals. When we stopped by the laundry room and she pointed out the sink in the laundry room and she said, I can just see you coming in with one of your foster animals after a walk on a rainy morning and giving them a bath. And there's all this spacious room. You could put kennels or litter boxes depending on what kind of pets you're going to foster. And then she knew that I wanted to entertain family and friends so she walked me out into the living room in the great room. And she said, look at all this space you'd have to entertain in your kitchens right here. And we offered a double oven so I can just see you cooking Thanksgiving dinner and you can cook your turkey and your side step road and everybody's here having fun and talking with you. And then she walked me out to the patio and she knows how much outside living is important to me and she pointed out the fact that they build wood-burning fireplaces on the patio and how she could see me having coffee out there on a chilly, Austin morning and enjoying myself. Yes, she shared the data. Yes, she offered me insights to help my logical brain make sense of all the options. But she also did something none of the other builders did. She connected with me on a personal level, an emotional level. She showed me when she sold me on a lifestyle. And because of that, she gave me a reason to believe that my choice to use them would remove the complexity and frustration of home-building that all the other builders had created. So what's actually interesting to me is that Bree's choice of a builder doesn't and didn't make the home-building process any less complicated. But what her builder has done is by trying that whole process to an outcome that Bree has really deeply committed to, that builder made the process seem very much less daunting. Or at the very least, she's made the pain a little bit easier to do. And while we're not building house-of-care, I would argue that creating a robust and sustainable data ecosystem is no less complicated. And in fact, I might argue it's more complicated as one of our two building blocks is people, not momentum, there are new roles, rules of engagement, processes tools, rules and procedures, guidelines, oh my, there's a lot going on. So it's no wonder that people tend to run from us or are at the very least slow to engage if they engage in the governance conversation at all. And so this is ultimately why storytelling becomes so critical as a tool in our governance and stewardship toolkit. Robert McKee, who was very much on the vanguard of making the case for story and business, the story as a business tool broadly, I think really did say it best. He said storytelling is the arc of involvement. And so like Bree's architects, we as data professionals need to really focus first on selling our colleagues and in some cases our partners or our customers on what it is we are trying to achieve before we scare the heck out of them with all the decisions that have to be made, the problems that have to be solved, and the work that will be required to bring that vision alive. And this is really because the truth is it's not that our colleagues don't care about the data per se. As we started out with early on, everyone will agree that data is important. It's just that what needs to happen next is a little more fuzzy. And when we fail to engage our colleagues in an effective way, it's far more likely that they just really don't understand their connections to the broader vision. We likely have not, and typically don't do a good job in making that connection between the data dialogue and the factors that actually motivate people to ask. And that will motivate them to ask even when they don't have to and even when it's hard. So, specifically, how often do we actually think about and speak to people about what is their personal motivation for engaging in better data behaviors? What matters to them as an individual? And how does what we are asking them to do either support the objectives they have been given as an employee or connect to a broader mission that they might support, like breeze passion for pet rescue and fostering? And on the social front, because the fact is our businesses and organizations are social organisms, how often do we really think and talk about how somebody's actions reflect upon or impact the broader audience and the people around them? And until we actually then start to connect on at least one of these levels, making the fundamental structural changes to roles and business processes and so on that make governance work over the long haul is going to be difficult at best. Kimberly, your spot on, because it drives home the point I made about how facts appear to be convincing, but facts alone rarely motivate a smooth change or adopt those new behaviors. Yeah, and I think to that end as well, one of the things that's righted very well is to create some of those connections tied into our sort of core motivation but also to harness what we call sort of the power of self-discovery, because we as individuals generally like to discover new ideas or factoids for ourselves as opposed to being told what to think and do, which for the most part we tend to react against. And so what we can do with stories is by allowing folks to apply principles of the story being told to their own lives, whether it's in the context of their business or broader personal context, we allow folks to apply principles of the stories to their own situation in their own way and thereby we make it personal. And if it doesn't seem like this is an obvious alignment with data stewardship and data governance, I want to let me share a story that maybe demonstrates that point. I very recently had the pleasure of working with a government ministry who is responsible for child services and youth justice. And this ministry had recently initiated a data stewardship program in the context of a much larger business re-engineering effort. And as those of you who might be in the public sector know, the environment is very, very challenging. We very often, execution requires on top-down policy-driven mandates being created. And there's a legacy of disjointed and disconnected piece parts between different agencies and departments, even though they may all be working with the same population, like children and youth. And now that I've said that out loud, I feel that's not actually so different than what we find for, that what we find in our for-profit sector where lines of business and processes are traditionally disintermediated, or traditionally segregated and disintermediated. Now, the traditional approach to selling data governance and data stewardship in this type of scenario might be to start to bring out those data architectural spider diagrams and showing everybody the multiple duplicated data environment to start to quantify the impact of missing data on our ability to understand which kids are getting which services and who's using the most services and how does a particular welfare program actually create or deter someone from ending up in the adjusted system, et cetera, et cetera. So we can come up with a lot of facts about where the system is working and not working, and we can show a lot of data about really the data itself. But in this case, this ministry actually took a fundamentally different approach to engaging people in the process. So rather than starting with the data, or even as I said, the data about the data, they came to the picture of the world as they wanted it to be. They started with a story of the confusing and overwhelming experience of their customers, who in this case are children and families who are typically already in crisis, and the experience that they struggle with as they make their way through this disjointed system that was currently in place. And they followed that by a view of the desired experience in which different departments provided a continuum of related service to those customers seamlessly, making both for happier customers, in this case citizens, and also for better outcomes, individually and system-wise. And by doing so, and by putting that story in the context of their customers and in the context of their staff, they were actually able to directly connect to the personal motivations of their employees, because most people don't go to work in the public sector for the profit and for gain. And by tying into that broader mandate for sort of social improvement and for helping those they serve, they were able to use the story as a guidepost and then ask individuals to color in the lines themselves and identify how their underlying data environment could become a key roadblock to achieving that vision. And perhaps most importantly, they then let individual departments and agencies, and in fact required individual departments and agencies to create their own data action plans, as opposed to telling them what the solution needed to be. And as a result, they've created points of personal ownership and accountability within the organization through that process. Now, I'm not suggesting here that story is a silver bullet. Okay? That telling a good story, painting a good vision and picture is going to solve all your woes in terms of enlistment and engagement. But it is another good tool to have in your governance and stewardship toolkit. It won't negate the need for deliberate strategy. It doesn't negate the need for a solid program planning and the creation of new roles and responsibilities and the hard change management work that goes with it. But I would argue that the ability to use stories to show how deliberate attention towards the data work is critical in the service of the much broader vision of the ministry did actually help open the doors and has helped help those open even as the inevitable challenges have arisen in implementation. At the end of the day, it's really about communication. How do we communicate what we're asking people to do and get them involved in that story? And this is a little bit of a side point, but it should come as no surprise then to anyone here that one of the biggest new trends we see in terms of, as we look at people looking to staff up data governance program offices or even to staff up analytic insight centers and some of these things, is that the trend is the hired journalist or other communicationally savvy individuals. There is similar to the role that Breathe as a multimedia strategist works and provides on our own best processes. Ultimately, I think it's fair to say or I believe that learning to communicate in a compelling and engaging way may very well be the last mile for all of us as data governance professionals. Really good point, Kimberly. So we want to kind of leave you with some points to ponder. It's kind of like the highlight reel for our session. The first one is that just don't lead with the data. Facts aren't what we remember and share, but stories are. And also, again, story is one sort of tool in our toolkit. And so this is not about forcing people to take on your point of view. What we want to do is that if we use a good story, it provides a grounds for discussion in a safe context without personal recrimination or people feeling like they're being called on the carpet. If we consider that water glass metaphor that Breathe shared on early, it's a very simple device that allows folks with very different perspectives be you an optimist, a pessimist, or even the occasional realist to discuss and better understand each other's perspective without requiring everyone to agree on just one point of view from the get-go. And frankly, they may never agree on one point of view, but at least there's a context for understanding. In addition, although we didn't talk a lot about this today, a good story will demonstrate behaviors and principles and provide a template for how and why we'd like people to act without requiring you to codify every rule or hand-down commandments for every situation that's likely to arrive. It's actually why fables are so powerful and long-lasting in our society. While their heads may agree, their heart is what makes people to action, so you've got to give them a reason to believe. Logic alone may convince, but it rarely motivates. Yeah, so if you now tie that data story to what motivates people, both personally and or socially, it really is going to continue to be an uphill battle to get them engaged, much less actively advocating for the data cause. And lastly, why as an audience should I care? If you can lead with that and include those visual cues using your words, images, or data visualizations, you'll keep them glued to their seats. So always start with why. So hopefully we've left you with some things to think about today. And just quickly before I turn the floor over to Shannon and we'll open up for questions. I do want to thank you for attending today, and that's the very end of the day, no less. We would also invite you to join us at Enterprise Data World, where we will be delving deeper into both why story works. We'll share some additional examples and walk you through the process and give you an opportunity to actually practice creating your own data stories. Over to you, Shannon. Thank you so much. Thank you for this great presentation as always. Just let everybody know. Kimberly and Brie will be joining you in the group chat over the next 10 minutes to go over questions and comments of the presentation. So feel free to start engaging them now. And thanks to all of our attendees who have participated in today's event. We hope it has been truly educational for everyone. And after the Q&A, you may continue to hang out and network amongst yourselves throughout the environment. We will be sending out the special recordings and slides from today's event to all registrants within the next two business days. And as Brie and Kimberly mentioned, the next big data receive event is one of our face-to-face conferences at Enterprise Data World 2016. So I should mention that the super early bird pricing ends this Friday. So the event was sold out last year, so be sure to get that booked early. Thanks again, everyone, for participating in today's event. Hope everyone has a great day.