 We go. 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 the current installment of the Monthly Data Diversity Webinar Series, Real-World Data Governance with Bob Steiner. Today Bob will be speaking about building a data governance roadmap and today sponsored by Nanta. Just a couple of points to get us started due to the large number of people that attend these sessions. You will be muted during the webinar. If you'd like to chat with us or with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so. Just click the chat icon in the bottom middle of your screen for that feature. And for questions, we will be collecting them via the Q&A in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag RWDG. And if you'd like to engage more with Bob and continue the conversations after the webinar, you can go to community.dativersity.net. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days, containing links to the slides, the recording of the session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me turn it over to Ernie for a word from our sponsor, Nanta. Ernie, hello and welcome. Thank you very much, Shannon. Really appreciate it and thanks everyone for attending. We hope that you're safe and well wherever you are. Here at Nanta, we offer what we call a unified lineage platform. Well, what exactly does that mean and what does Nanta do? We help our customers understand how data flows through their organization. Where does it come from? Where does it go to? And what happens to it along the way? We help organizations achieve regulatory compliance, enhance their governance objectives, reduce development costs across IT, especially with use cases such as root cause analysis, and shortening delivery cycles for ground to cloud migrations and application modernization. Our customers using Nanta manage their entire end-to-end lineage across their whole data life cycle. How does it work? Well, Nanta looks at your code. We crunch through, basically parsing through your SQL stored procedures, your ETL programs, the business intelligence code that you have, and we pour into it. We look at the where clause is in your SQL statements and the individual columns and attributes and the expressions and transformation functions that you have. And while we're doing so, we're documenting the lineage along the way and ultimately presenting that in a visual metaphor that's an interactive map that can be looked at directly or where it makes sense, push it into a third-party governance solution. Let's take a look at that visualization. One of the key objectives here at Nanta is to make lineage easy to consume. And we start with a heavy amount of color coding. We'll provide assets that are color-oriented to their technology, a particular database or a particular ETL tool or reporting function, or switch the colors around so that we can provide a different color for the storage assets that you have, whether they are tables or columns, so you can differentiate that from your SQL. And ultimately, allow you to navigate even through the lineage itself, as you can see here in this simple screenshot, wherever I might have clicked, a column might show up in one color and everything upstream is in one color, everything downstream is in another. And while we're lacing this out for you, remember that I said this was a platform for lineage. So we're also able to tell you lots of statistics about the lineage. You can see all of the wonderful lines of data flow relationships we see here. But we also have the opportunity to be able to tell you which tables, if any, aren't being accessed by any programs or aren't being properly fed. And this can give you lots of additional insights. And further to that, we keep time slices. So when we look at something like this calculation for birth name and see where it comes from, what did it look like last month, last quarter, last year. And so being able to see historical time slices is very critical as part of the initiatives that you're working on. So we are very happy today to sponsor this Dataversity webinar and have Bob Siner in the presentation about governance. Lineage is a critical component to all of your successful governance initiatives. Shannon, back to you. Well, I guess we'll wait for Shannon or I could just introduce myself. I guess I've already been introduced by Shannon. So apologize, Bob. I was talking away there. Thank you, Ernie. Thank you so much. And if you have questions for Ernie, I do see one that came in already. He will be joining us for the Q&A portion of the webinar at the end. So feel free to submit them in the Q&A there. Now let me introduce you our series speaker, Bob Siner. Bob is the president and principal of KIK Consulting and Educational Services and the publisher of the Data Administration newsletter TDAN.com. Bob has been a recipient of the Damon Professional Award for significant and demonstrable contributions to the data management industry. Bob specializes in non-invasive data governance, data stewardship, and metadata management solutions. And with that, I will give the floor to Bob to start his presentation. Hello and welcome. Hi, Shannon. Hi, everybody. Hi, Ernie. Thank you for your presentation, Ernie. Sorry to step on your toes there, Shannon. I could never do your job as well as you do. So I won't even begin to try. But again, great to have everybody with us today. And I want to echo what Ernie said. I hope you're safe and well wherever you are. And so let's jump into the webinar today. As Shannon mentioned, we're going to talk about building a data governance roadmap. And I'm going to share some information on what it takes to kind of get prepared and to get started in what you're going to build a roadmap to do and what you're going to assess against because it oftentimes it makes sense. In fact, I would say all the times it makes sense to take a ready aim fire approach rather than a ready fire aim approach. So you want to make certain that what you're building your roadmap to accomplish is set on specific targets. And those targets would be some things that you have assessed your organization as to the readiness for a data governance program. And so we'll talk about that in a second here. Before I get started, I just wanted to share a few bits of information with you. As you know, this webinar series takes place on the third Thursday of every month right at this time. And next month I will be talking about data governance roles and responsibilities. I'll be sharing a complete operating model of roles and responsibilities. It's one of the most popular articles on TNAN.com. If it goes through those roles, I hope that you'll join us there so we can share some of the updates that I've made to that set of roles and responsibilities. And you can register for the upcoming webinars on TNAN at KIT Consulting and at dataversity.net. Shannon mentioned noninvasive data governance. In my intro, I wrote a book several years ago on noninvasive data governance. If you're curious as to how noninvasive data governance is different from other forms or other approaches to governance, please go out and look at the book, look at past webinars that I've talked about the subject of specifically noninvasive data governance. I'll be speaking at a couple of dataversity events coming up this year. The first one is Enterprise Data World in October. And I'll also be speaking of data governance and information quality conference in December as well. But I do have a piece of breaking news. Actually, it was breaking news when I gave the webinar last month, I believe, or maybe a couple of weeks ago, where I talked about the fact that I have a new online learning plan coming to Dataversities Training Center pretty soon. And that one focuses on business glossaries, data dictionaries and data catalogs. And that will be made up of six different courses, modules. Please go out and take a look at that. If you're interested, there's also courses on noninvasive data governance, noninvasive metadata governance and a whole slew of other subjects that would be very interesting to data practitioners. Shannon mentioned the data administration newsletter, TDM.com. A new issue was published yesterday. I'll refer to an article that was in that issue in the middle of this presentation. And so please go out, that's free of charge. It's available to anybody who wants to learn about data administration and data management. And last but not least, KIK Consulting. KIK stands for Knowledge is King. And that is the place to go if you want to learn more information about, first of all, how to reach out to me, but also learn about noninvasive data governance. So what am I going to talk about today? I'm going to talk about kind of building up to building the roadmap and then building the roadmap itself. So first, I'm going to talk about criteria that we use for defining best practices that we will assess against as we are turning those into recommendations and then actionable items that would go into our roadmap. I'm going to share with you some examples of the repeated actionable streams that I have experienced from many of the clients that I have worked with. And you'll see, it's pretty obvious why they would be actionable streams and things that you would want to include within your roadmap. I'll talk specifically about the role of the program administrator, the person that has the accountability or the responsibility for executing the roadmap that we're putting in place. And then we'll talk about the importance of communicating the roadmap to key stakeholders across your organization. So first, I wanted to talk to you about the, let me just make sure I'm changing slides right here. That's not working right for it. Oh, there we go. Okay. So the first thing I want to talk about is those criteria for defining best practices in your organization for data governance. And so one thing I want to make certain that you're aware of is that these are not best practices that are down in the weeds. These are not the day to day activities, but these are truly the best practices for standing up the program and getting the program started. So when you're developing a roadmap for your program, it's not going to be specifically for things that are down in the weeds. It's going to be those specific items and those actions that you need to take to get started with your program or to take a look at the program that you already have in place and to learn from it and to improve on it as you move forward. I'll share with you some information about the two specific criteria that I use to determine whether or not something is best practice and something that you should include as best practice when you're doing that assessment. I'll share with you the five questions that you should ask about each of the best practices and then we'll talk about assessing against these specific best practices and what that turns into so that we can evolve into the roadmap that we're completing for our organization. So the first thing, and it's very important that you remember this, but the roadmap that we're talking about here is for standing up the program. It's not for improving data quality. It's not for protecting sensitive data. It is for putting together the program that is going to be necessary to enable your organization to do these things. So when you're doing this assessment up front, when you're doing the best practice assessment to build out the roadmap, you want to make it that point very clear, very early, that these are really the things that are necessary, the things that have to take place in order for our organization to be successful with our governance program. And it's not, as I mentioned before, it's not down in the weeds, at least not yet. At some point, certainly, we're going to want to get into the subject of, you know, what are the specific actions that we need to take in order to improve quality and in order to protect data to improve the understanding of the data. And I wanted to let you know that I kind of start out with a series of best practices. And I'm going to share with you six of the most commonly used best practices and highlight the ones for you that are used most often by the organizations that I work with. And again, the idea here is that we're going to take a ready aim fire approach rather than just starting by putting together a roadmap, because we don't know what we're targeting, then we're going to have a harder time getting to that target. If you don't have a map that shows you how to get to the place that you're trying to get to, maybe on vacation, you're not going to be able to get there successfully. So we're going to start with the best practices and, you know, what we want to talk to people across the organization about their, about how they feel about these best practices, about where the organization stands in comparison these best practices, so that when we build the roadmap, it is successfully addressing those things that we need to address to be successful with our program. So a lot of organizations start out by interviewing a cross section of people across different business units. Sometimes organizations don't do that. Sometimes they say, well, let's start with this person and let's get their feedback. I suggest typically talking to a bunch of people within the organization to get started. So you can do a typical cross-section of different business functions and get ideas not just of the person that has the responsibility for putting the governance program in place. So those two criteria, these are really important when we're determining what's best practice for our organization. Well, the first one is that they need to be practical. They need to be achievable. They need to add value. And if you ask yourself about each of the best practices, are these practical for our organization, given our situation, you need to be able to answer yes. Are they achievable? Do they add value? Well, the answer to that question has to be yes. The second criteria that I use to determine the best practice is, will our data governance program, again, remember, these are best practices around standing up the program, will the program be at risk if we don't achieve these best practices? So if you can answer yes to those two questions, then you should consider including those as best practices that you're assessing against in order to take the appropriate steps to build out your roadmap. So typically in an organization, they limit themselves to four to six best practices. You don't want dozens upon dozens of best practices. That's why I want to share with you the ones that I find to be used most often. And when I say some of the best practices are binary, you'll see what I mean in a minute, but the truth is that some of them we could say, yes, we're doing this, no, we're not doing this, others we can say, well, there are certain things that are helping us to lean in that direction, but some of them are truly on and off. Either we have these things defined or we don't have these things defined. So you might be able to complete this assessment relatively quickly. So the five questions, and hold on because I'm going to be sharing with you those best practices in a minute, but the five questions that we want to answer about each of the best practices are, well, first of all, why do we consider this best practice for our organization? What are we already doing in our organization that we can leverage in order to be successful in achieving this best practice? Where is there opportunity to improve? So those are the strengths and the weaknesses. What are we doing that we can leverage and where is there opportunity for us to improve in our organization? Then it becomes really important to articulate the gap between the present practice of what you're doing and what the best practice says we need to have in place in order to be successful with our program. And then it's really good to be able to articulate the gap that's associated, the risk that's associated with that gap. So what is the a delt of between what we are presently doing and what we need to be doing? And that will become really evident as we talk about the specific best practices. So when we get started, when we develop the best practices, we want to provide these best practices to the people that we're going to be interviewing. If we're going to be interviewing people across the organization, we might take a chance to pre-fill in some of the answers to in that questionnaire, specifically the one about why is this best practice for our organization? You know what the people that you're going to be interviewing, the people that you're going to be involving in the assessment might not have the answer to that. So you might want to pre-fill in that answer and put it in as few words as you can, but make certain that you hit the points as to well why is this so important to us if we're going to be successful with data governance. I also suggest that you might think about limiting, putting some limited bullets under the answers to the other questions associated with each best practice just to give people ideas as to what you're looking for across the organization. And then we're going to use these answers that we're getting from people, these findings from people across the organization to build out the recommendations so that we can then build the actionable streams that we're going to fit into our roadmap. And so I wanted to start by talking about using these results that we receive from the assessment to build the roadmap. And so those of you who know me well might know that I'm a LEGOs guy. I like LEGOs a lot. I think about you know building things all the time and on the right you know when I was looking for an icon or an image to use that associated with the word build. LEGOs was the first one that came up and then I took a snapshot of some shelves in my offices. As you can see I get involved in LEGOs and what I'm not doing data stuff. You know everybody's got to have a hobby. That's a harmless hobby. But you know we're going to talk about building those best practices. I'm going to share those with you. Building recommendations. I'm going to share with you some examples of recommendations. We'll talk about turning those recommendations into actionable streams and then building a notional timeline. That's what the roadmap is that a lot of organizations are looking for is when are we going to get started on these things? Or how long are they going to take? Who are we going to need to involve in those actions? So let's talk about building those best practices. And so the first thing I wanted to do about the best practices is share with you some of the key tips and things that I have found important as we're putting best practices together. And the first one is that we need to write them in the present tense. So we are doing this or we are not doing that or we don't want to say we in the future need to do these things. We're assessing against these best practices as if they are practices that are presently taking place. So I typically suggest and when I got started I always put them in the present tense but I found that it was much more impactful if we write our best practices in the present tense. And oftentimes when we're sharing best practices with people across the organization it's a good idea to underline the key terms that you're using in those best practices because people might not have the same understanding of those terms across the organization. Oftentimes it's important to gain sponsor approval of the best practices before we take those out to the audiences that we're going to involve in our assessment. You're going to limit the number of best practices like I said before. You don't want to have a ton of best practices. You want to have a handful things that you can cover in a half hour to 45 minutes to an hour meeting rather than something that's going to take an afternoon to go through with any of the audiences that are willing to participate in the assessment. And again I want to repeat this and I mentioned this earlier before. These are best practices associated with standing up the program because when we develop the roadmap those actions that we're going to take are going to be associated with standing up the program not some specific opportunity that we are addressing with our dating governance program. All right I've been leading up to it for a while. I wanted to share with you the best practices that from my experience the most of my organizations or most of the organizations that I have worked with have used as their best practices. And if you read through them quickly I'm going to go through them quickly one by one but if you read through them you'll see that they are they are written in present tense. And if I told you that 99% of the organizations that I work with choose that number one best practice as their first best practice I'd be lying to you because it's a hundred percent because we all know how important it is that senior leadership supports sponsors and understands data governance. Perhaps they understand the understanding of data governance is even more important than the support and sponsorship. Although they may not support and sponsor you unless they really understand what you're doing when it comes to putting your data governance program into place. Is it practical and doable in your organization that you can get senior leadership to support sponsor and understand data governance? Well I would hope so because they're going to need to be there in order to prevent your program from being at risk and they're going to need to continue to support sponsors and understand the program. Are we going to be at risk if we don't have that level of senior leadership support sponsorship and understanding I would guess in most organizations you're going to be at risk your program will be at risk at some point in time. Resources are allocated to define and administer the program. I've been known to say and in fact I've put an article in the the issue of TDAN yesterday that was called data will not govern itself. The program will not administer itself. You need to have resources that have some time allocated to it. I had a client where it was one eighth of their job to put a data governance program in place and they were the only person that was focused on it and it moved slowly. They told me it would move slowly. Typically the speed that we can move with implementing a roadmap is going to be directly associated with the number of resources or the types of resources or the amount of time those resources have allocated to defining and administering the program. Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and accepted. That's one of those that potentially could be binary just like the the next one which is goals, scope, expectations, metrics. These things are defined and accepted across the organization. Some organizations could say you know what we haven't started on that yet. We don't have these things defined. So you'll find in the assessment that you're just going to very quickly get to a yes no answer as to whether or not you have these things defined in your organization. But again is it is it practical and doable to define these things without a doubt? We just need to have some good guidance. We need to be well read on these subjects and what organizations do when it comes to defining roles and responsibilities and the goals, scope, expectations and and such. Data is governed consistently across the organization. Well is that true? Are there consistencies in some parts of the organization but not in other parts of the organization? You know Ernie talked about the importance of the lineage data, the lineage metadata that we have across the organization. Well maybe the parts of the organization and those investments that you have in your and data resources, the ones that are being utilized most heavily are the ones that people understand where the data came from and what happened to the data along the way as it was pulled from its native source into the the data resource that's part of the investment. So again that's a best practice. The data is governed consistently across the organization. Data governance policy and I've done just recently I've done another real-world data governance webinar on data governance policy some organizations are policy driven and require data governance policy some are not. So data governance so if you are an organization that is policy driven perhaps one of your best practices will state that data governance policy is approved by your senior leadership and so I talked about underlying those key words that were parts of the best practices to make certain that people understand what it is that you're talking about. So the first word is in the first best practice is senior leadership. What do we mean by senior leadership? What do we mean by supporting, sponsoring and understanding data governance and data governance again may be a term that you may want to define. I define data governance as the execution and enforcement of authority over the management of data and I stated that many times in the webinars and presentations that I've given. It's worded quite strongly but if you have a strong definition for data governance you want to make certain that people understand how these words are defined for you and your organization. I won't go through the rest of the words that allocated roles and responsibilities all of those things that are underlined you might want to think about in your assessment including a page a glossary page that defines what these things mean associated with data governance within your organization. And then we want to take the information that we gather as we're talking about each of these best practices and we want to build out recommendations from those best practices again taking the ready aim fire approach instead of building a road map that's not necessarily focused on anything. The recommendations are going to be based on the results that you hear from people and the results that you receive from the assessment that you conduct. And oftentimes when you're building out these recommendations and you may have a page or two documents that states what the recommendations are you might want to tie them back to which specific best practice they are recommendations for you to that you're addressing as part of your program. Oftentimes you know multiple best practices will be associated with each recommendation and you want to provide the assessment details at least in the back of your assessment to tell the whole story and you might even want to share well what part of the organization did we talk to that answered this specific question about this best practice in a particular way and you're going to use all of that information to develop the recommendations and this is the other slide or another one of the slides that I feel is really important and this is really representative of the recommendations that most organizations receive when they do an assessment. So you might say well why do we even need to do the assessment if these are the things that I'm recommending that you do with your data governance program. Well in some ways that's true. I mean these are the actions that you need to take when you're implementing your governance program but oftentimes it's very important to have the information that you have gathered as part of the assessment to support why you're recommending the things that you're recommending. And if you look through these delivering an operating model of roles and responsibilities well we know that our data governance program is going to be based on roles and responsibilities from your executive leadership to your data governance council if you call it that down to your data domain stewards or your subject matter experts all the way down to the operational data stewards of your organization you want to make certain that all of these different roles are well defined. And so that if you have don't have that already in place or you haven't validated that with a proof of concept or a pilot you want to make certain that you're delivering a valid operating model of roles and responsibilities for your organization when it comes to governing data. And as I said in the next webinar next month I'll be talking about roles and responsibilities in that webinar. Delivering a data governance policy or a charter or guidelines or all three of these things may be very important. So a lot of times organizations say that we need to build a data governance policy. We may recognize that we have other types of policies already that exist in the organization and but we don't have one that specifically talks to the governance of the data. So delivering a data governance policy might be one of those recommendations that come out of the assessment. Determining who is going to have responsibility for data governance. That's a question that I get all the time. So determining the placement of where in the organization and who will be the people in that part of the organization that will have responsibility for data governance. Well as a part of your roadmap if you don't have that defined already that needs to be an actual set of items for your organization is determining that placement and who will administer the program. Incrementally rolling out the program starting with a proof of concept or a pilot can be a specific recommendation. Delivering a communication plan. I've done webinars and written articles on data governance communication plan. Communications is a big percentage of successful data governance. I mean you need to be able to communicate successfully with different people with different levels of the organization. Delivering a data documentation or a metadata platform or a catalog. Being able to demonstrate the lineage as Ernie talked about with the MANTA tool. You know being able to demonstrate to people the information that they need in order to get the most value out of the data. That's going to be a recommendation that comes out of your assessment is that we need to have this platform or we need to learn to leverage what we do have as a platform for data documentation. Delivering smart metrics and those and smart is the acronym for specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timely. That's going to be an important recommendation that comes out of a lot of assessments is that we need to know whether or not our program is successful or not. So we need to be able to measure the value that is being added to the organization, the acceptability of the program to the organization. Those are where a lot of organizations start in measuring their programs and then incrementally building the capacity to complete the first seven items on the list. Now we know that if we only have part of one person's time it's getting hard to do all these things at once. So we want to incrementally build the capacity of our data governance office or our data governance team or the people that have the responsibility for data governance to make certain that we can accomplish all these things that we're recommending for the organization. And so just to kind of highlight again the specific things that come out of the recommendations there's the operating model, there's the policy, it's who's going to be responsible for this and where should it reside in the organization. You know not trying to boil the ocean and doing data governance all at once incrementally doing it building a communication plan having a platform or a catalog for data documentation metrics building the capacity those might be the quarter terms that you use when you're building out the recommendations. Now these recommendations are going to help you to build the actions that are necessary in as part of your roadmap. So if you'll notice these are the same bullets as on the previous slide and the recommendations but they've been reordered. And so again it's not going to be the same for everybody and you're going to want to make certain that you do the things that are most important first like determining who's going to be responsible for governance and where it's going to reside and getting the number of people that are necessary to do these things. Roles and responsibilities are going to come early communications is going to come early perhaps delivering a policy that's necessary in your organization. So you want to reorder these in an order that makes sense for your organization. So truly the difference between this slide and the previous slide are these are reordered. You know often comes I'll report out the recommendations the way I did on the previous slide but when it comes to making them actionable streams this is where we start to put them in order of what we need to do. And then I wanted to share this diagram with you as well and it's a basically a notional timeline and what makes it notional is that it really depends on when you start and when you think you'll be able to finish these actions that are associated with each of these actionable streams that are part of your data governance roadmap. Data governance roles and responsibilities organizations start early building out the communication plan doing the incremental rollout but starting with a pilot or a proof of concept in your organization. You know so there are activities typically I suggest that phase one is the assessment is the roadmap is the development of the communication plan and the roles and responsibilities. When we get to phase two now we're going to start to really formalize these things socialize them to the organization and test them during the proof of concept activities. So again the notional timeline it may look different for your organization but the idea is that you've got to put timeline so people can understand what it is that you're doing and when you're going to do it and when it's going to be effective to the organization. So let me spend a little bit of time here talking about the examples of these actionable streams the roles and responsibilities communication plan and so let's go through each of these five main pieces that I would almost I would not even hesitate to say that as part of your roadmap you're going to have these items as part of your roadmap. So the first one is roles and responsibilities and I'm not going to spend time today going through that model that's in the bottom right hand side of your screen but I will tell you this that there's an article written or actually there was a webinar that I did with Dataiversity back in April 2019 if you're interested all their their webinars are on demand there's also articles in the TDAN publication about that but you want to build an operating model which is that pyramid diagram that you see below in whatever format you're going to use but oftentimes that's going to have an executive a strategic attack for operation as a partner organization I've worked with a client recently that actually said well you know what the data governance administrator isn't really part of any of those they're not really a support role they're more of an administrative role so they've now started to call that out as being an administrative role and make certain that when you name these things you don't necessarily need to call it a data governance council you could call it a committee or a team or you could just repurpose another group that you have in your organization as you're moving forward so name these things properly but more information about what it takes to build on an operating model roles and responsibilities is available building out a communication plan I mentioned that as being important and a little bit later in the presentation I'm going to share with you an example of a communication plan but I always talk about it in terms of the three O's of communication and that is let's orient people to data governance let's onboard them and let's communicate with them in an ongoing fashion and we want to make certain that there are different types of communication associated with each of these O's and the onboarding as an example of a piece of the communication we want to teach people what their role is what value they're going to receive from applying governance to the activities that are taking place with them and in this plan that I'll share with you you're cross-referencing the types of communications that you're doing with the different roles we know we can't communicate with everybody in exactly the same way so we shouldn't even try to do that and then make certain that when you complete this plan you include the message that you want to share with this specific audience in relationship to that type of communication how often you're going to share that message how are we going to deliver it is it going to be in person is it going to be through a presentation is it going to be through a recorded video that you're sharing with people and what actions they need to take from those communications again the communication plan is a actionable stream that needs to be included in your governance roadmap if you don't have it in there already maybe you've already experienced that love to hear from you as to whether or not that is part of your roadmap for moving forward the data governance policy again it's oftentimes the backbone of a program if it's necessary if you're a policy given organization and in fact your organization I can almost assure you has policies of different types and all policies govern I mean that's the purpose of having a governance having policies in place is to make certain that people understand what is appropriate and what is not appropriate activities and when you have a policy getting approval of that policy by people at the senior leadership level is really important because that approval signifies that your leadership supports sponsors and understands what you're doing and as you remember that was the very first best practice is that senior leadership supports sponsors and understands what data governance is and how it's going to work for the organization you know the policy oftentimes will spell out the core principles of governing data and the need for governing data as an asset or managing data as an asset that we need roles and responsibilities to find oftentimes these policies will define the principles the constraints and the consequences that are necessary as part of your policy building out capacity as I mentioned earlier as well this is really important because this is not going to happen on its own this requires that people have the time allocated to do this so you're not going to start at full capacity in fact I wouldn't suggest starting with a huge team because the first question people are going to have is what are these people doing you know why don't you build your team as you have the need for people within your organization so oftentimes that capacity depends on you just demonstrating success to your organization and you know you'll oftentimes be allocated more resources to work with you if you're adding value and if your customers internally within your organization can state that you're demonstrating value and success to them and consider that you may want to take a federated approach versus a centralized approach versus a distributed approach to your organization well a lot of that's going to help to dictate what type of capacity we're going to need what types of people we're going to need across the organization to have discussions with different lines of business to educate them to socialize them on the concepts of data governance and governing data and I mentioned the capacity and it really relates to that best practice number two which is that you need to have resources allocated to managing your program or your program will become at risk immediately the incremental rollout and I talk about this all the time you can find it in assorted webinars through data diversity you can find it in assorted TNN articles as well but most organizations don't want to take a big bang approach you can't slip a switch and have governance come on for your entire organization you're going to do it incrementally you're going to learn from what you're doing and you're going to improve on your roles and responsibilities your communications but you're not going to know if these things work for you until you actually go try to implement them as part of your program sizing and selecting the proof of concept there could be another complete webinar on that do we pick low-hanging fruit do we pick things that are really front of house back of house related are they things that the customers see are they things that we need to improve operations and selecting and sizing the appropriate proof of concept is a very important piece of the actionable streams as you're building out your program testing the operating model and the processes and communications through that proof of concept or pilot or key and incrementally building out the tools that you need or looking to see what tools you have in your environment do you have a tool that does let many inch for you or do you need a tool like Amanda that would help you to visualize and share with people where the data is coming from where it's going and how they can use that data across the organization so now let's talk about the role of the program administrator that's that person that has the responsibility for administering the program if you've got a question about governance we come back to the administrator you know they're responsible for building the processes they're responsible for a lot of things so I say they're responsible for everything I mean that in a specific context when we're creating a race e-chart oftentimes the different process steps of the processes we've defined have an R next to the program administrator because they are responsible for at least guiding the activities associated with each of those steps they're responsible for communicating with the council facilitating the workgroup so let's talk about each of these things real quickly and the first one is just like I said in the present article on tdm.com about the data won't govern itself well the program will not administer itself it requires resources so if we are going to improve the value and the quality of data as an asset across the organization this is not going to naturally or magically occur within our organization somebody has to have the responsibility for that and that could be your data governance lead your manager your administrator somebody with a completely different title than any of those but the person that has the responsibility for guiding the program and they're responsible typically to so they're first of all they're accountable to their management for making certain this happens but they're also responsible to the strategic level which might be called a council or something similar to that so the administrator plays that pivotal role in your program and that really aligns with the second best practice that I shared with you earlier which is that time needs to be allocated to do these things across your organization somebody has to have the responsibility for building out the processes and the artifacts they're not going to build themselves the program goal is to provide that value add but by creating processes that you can then reuse hey if you did this for one part of the organization you can do this for another part of the organization will the process be exactly the same maybe but maybe not but you need somebody to guide those activities and make certain that you're building up your toolkit of things that data governance can do to the organization oftentimes organizations use a governance activity matrix may be more familiar to you as a racy matrix to define the steps of a process and who's responsible who's accountable who's consulted and informed you need to cross-reference the process steps with the roles and include information about approximation of how much time it's going to take how long and over a period of time is it going to take and what the outcome is that's expected from each step and when I said before that they're responsible for everything in terms of a racy matrix you're going to most often find the letter R next to this step under the column of the data governance administrator they're the person that's going to be responsible for most of these steps they can also be responsible with the working teams or the groups that you're putting together to solve specific data issues or to address specific data opportunities typically when you're creating a racy one role is accountable but you can have multiple roles that are responsible for the activities of your governance program or the activities of that specific process and so the administrator should have experience or they should be mentored or they should be very willing to learn what it takes if they have not tried to administer a governance program in the past and oftentimes the program administrator has the responsibility of communicating with the council whether that's through scheduled council meetings they provide an agenda for those meetings they direct the meeting sometimes they provide minutes or appropriate follow-up with the council members to let them know these are the things that we've discussed within our organization when it comes to data governance and these are the things that we discussed with the council during this specific meeting and they facilitate the work group so when we build the working groups as part of our operating model of roles and responsibilities somebody needs to guide them somebody needs to provide them some direction and hold their hands oftentimes it's this administrator or the administrator with somebody from a project management office or a project manager that will facilitate the activities of the working groups they provide the preliminary and the extended roles things that are going to be necessary in order to solve specific problems that are or address opportunities with the working groups they provide the repeatable processes or they provide a preliminary process and then they are the key resource that tweaks that process as you're figuring out the best way to utilize that process within your organization and they're the ones that provide the effective communication and the leadership for your governance program throughout your organization so the last thing that I want to talk to you is now once we've built a roadmap made up of those specific actionable items that I've shared with you we want to manage to a communication plan make sure that the action items and the roadmap itself is part of what we're communicating I'll spend a couple seconds talking about again the three O's of communications because they're really important I'm going to share with you three stakeholder questions things that I think that you can ask your stakeholders to determine why data governance is necessary in your organization and then they also they participate very heavily the administrator is involved very heavily in the data governance council meetings so when I talk about managing to a communication plan well the development of that communication plan is often a key part of your data governance roadmap if it's not you should be rethinking your plan the next slide or actually in two slides from now I'm going to share with you a copy of what that action what that communication plan looks like the data the information of data governance will not communicate itself so we need to create the details of that plan as to what's going to be communicated how we're going to communicate it how often we're going to communicate it and what tools and things can we as the people that are administering data governance use to communicate successfully with the stakeholders of the organization what's included in the roadmap and how and the steps that we're taking to move our program forward so I mentioned before the three O's I had a five questions I had a two criteria so might as well have another number three O's of communications you know the orientation communications which could include the introduction to governance and the work that you've done to date the levels of support that are in place or that are required you know what expectation and value add governance is expected to provide to the organization and then it comes to the onboarding communication which includes you know when people are expected to do something what is specifically going to be their responsibility or what role-based activities are we going to ask these people to become involved in gamification is this just recent webinar on data diversity about data governance gamification you know making it interesting making it fun for people across the organization so that would be part of your onboarding as well ongoing would include the updated status metrics and the changes in different tools and documentation that you have across the organization so here is the example of the communication plan and I know that it's very small and that you can't read it but I just wanted to share conceptually with you that down the left hand side of the matrix you've got different types of communications you've got the orientation communication in the top section and you've got the onboarding part in the section section and then you have the ongoing communications in the third section and that was from top to bottom and you want to make certain that you have built out appropriate communications for each of the different audiences that are part of your operating model which is also part of your data governance roadmap so again if you're interested in this I know Shannon attaches the templates to the email that she sends out after the webinars but this is a very important artifact please feel free to use it let me know how you use it I'd be curious as to what value it's adding for you so we need the stakeholders to make sure that they understand what we're doing again going back to that first best practice to the support sponsor and understand what you're doing we need to ask the stakeholders what they need to know when it comes to the data and there's typically three questions that I suggest when we're talking about convincing stakeholders that data governance is necessary the first question is what can't you do that you'd like to do because you don't have the data to do it what would you do with the data if you had the data that you needed and the ideal situation in your organization what are the things that we could now do and leverage across the organization and then the third question is well how do those first two questions relate to data governance and why is it important to know what they can't do and what they would be able to do in terms of how data governance will add value to the organization communicate the road map to the stakeholders through the council meetings you know at least if you already have a group that you're leveraging make it a line item on the agenda so at least data governance is discussed at each of these meetings it's presented by the council owner or the administrator you can present the assessment findings the recommendations and these specific actional streams that are going to be a core part of your data governance roadmap so I know I went through these things quickly I'm going to turn it back over to Shannon in a minute here but the talked about the criteria for defining best practices for data governance because we want to take that ready aim fire approach instead of the ready fire aim approach using the results of the assessment to build out the recommendations and therefore building the roadmap it's the actual streams that make up the roadmap I shared with you those examples of the specific actionable streams that many organizations will include in their roadmap we talked about the role of the program administrator in making certain that the that the roadmap is being executed and then the importance of communicating the roadmap to the appropriate people across the organization and with that I will turn it back to Shannon to see if we have any questions today Bob thank you so much for this great presentation and of course we do have questions coming in just answer the most commonly asked questions just a reminder I will send a follow-up email by end of day Monday for this webinar with links to the slides and the recording of this session and anything else requested throughout diving in here the first question that came in here Ernie is for you is Manta a data catalog it looks similar to data catalogs with lineage graphics lines assets etc wonderful question and Manta complements catalog solutions but we're focused on lineage so we do complement a variety of catalog solutions where we partnerships with them and actually use their production API to push lineage into the catalog but we're focused solely on the lineage issue and what usually happens is that the lineage within the catalog is at a governance level it's usually higher level like a summary and then when we push the lineage up we include a hyperlink back to Manta for the detailed like you know really gory goopy lineage that people want to see when they really want to get into the transformation logic or their history perfect I love it and just diving into the next question chair so what is the most unique best practice you have seen and I've kind of been muting you guys go up this little echo coming through so if you can just if you're not the one speaking well stay muted that'll help that but Bobby you want to take that one first and what is the most unique best practice you have seen yeah I need to unmute myself yeah I'm sorry if the background noise is coming from me the I don't know if there's really any unique ones I would say that certainly that first best practice is the one that's used all the time that we need to have the senior leadership support sponsorship and understanding or we at some point our program is going to be at risk the other one that I would want to focus on is really associated with the metadata that's not necessarily included in everybody's best practices but making certain that we have data documentation so that people can utilize data consistently across the organization that was the specific best practice about the consistency and how we do this and the fact is that making certain that and responding to that best practice by stating you know what we need to know where the data came from people that's one of the first and foremost questions that we get when people have questions about the data in their analytical platforms in the data lake in the data warehouse is where do the data come from how did it get this way so making certain that we focus on that best practice of consistency in management of data across the organization now you know organizations are focusing on consistency when it comes to data protection and making certain that we handle the data the appropriate way depending on how the data is classified there's a lot less consistency in organizations around data quality how many times do you have data customer defined or have customer defined in their vendor or product or material and you know how many times and how consistent are we in being able to answer appropriate questions about that data so I would really focus I have said the most unique one is really that consistency one and you know making certain that we're providing the metadata that we need to help people to understand the data that they're leveraging that was very complete all right well what is the single most important factor in determining the organizational scope that should be covered by any one data governance program well you want me to take that one first I guess Ernie I'll take that one first and unless you want to talk to it I don't know if there's really one specific factor or one way to figure out you know what should be in scope in your program I would say just don't try to do everything at once have a specific purpose of your program if it is to use strategic data with confidence or it's to protect classified information whatever that purpose of your program is don't say that you're going to be everything to everybody in the organization so when you're you should limit it and you should make certain that when you define your roles and responsibilities you're defining them in such a way that makes sense for whatever the purpose is for your program so if you add and expand your program to address additional purposes then you can utilize the same operating model to address those new purposes as you have in the others I would say that there's not a very simple way to scope but don't make it too big that's what I suggest we also have a better chance of getting an immediate success and if you aren't focused on one particular area that's causing immediate pain or needs the better understanding of the data then you're kind of scrambling around and never getting a home run so get a home run on that initial place and then you'll have lots of sponsors who value and they will redeem itself data governance support data quality and how is that illustrated in these best practices well data governance addresses data quality because you know you need to have people that are responsible for number one recognizing what the quality of the data is and in order to determine what the quality of the data is we need to know what's right so we can now identify and recognize what's not right you know data governance you know the people in the organization that have the responsibility for improving the quality of the data may very well be the data stewards of the organization the people that are defining producing and or using the data so some people use data quality and data governance in the same breath and say that they're kind of the same thing well they're not exactly the same thing there are other reasons why organizations with governance programs in place but the relationship between data quality you're not going to be able to improve the quality of the data without improving your formalization of governing the data in your organization I saw you unmute yourself there Ernie did you have that done I know I'm good so is the data governance council responsible for the privacy and security such as GDPR and user level data access well the council themselves won't be the ones that roll up their sleeves and do that that's going to be that part of your organization that has the responsibility for the program but they might be accountable or the person that is responsible for that may be accountable to them to make certain that it happens the council is typically the liaison with the executive or senior leadership part of the organization and oftentimes the council is then given the responsibility to make certain that our data is being protected our quality is being improved for the ones that are going to roll up their sleeves that's typically going to be the subject matter experts the data stewards the working groups the more tactical and operational parts of the organization all right well that does bring us to the top of the hour here I thank you both so much and thanks to Manta for sponsoring and helping to make these webinars happen again just a reminder I will send a follow-up email to all registrants by end of day Monday with links to the slides and links to the recording of the presentation thanks everyone for hanging out and and hanging in there with us today we really appreciate it and hope you all have a great day and stay safe out there thanks all thanks guys have a great day thanks Sharon thanks Arnie