The Credera Brief | Rethinking Data Governance

Credera Team

The Credera Brief | Rethinking Data Governance

In our latest edition of The Credera Brief, Credera Partner Ryan Gross shares a new mindset that enables data governance efforts to add significant value to your organization.

A New Way to Think About Data Governance

As data becomes a more integral part of your organization's business plan, finding a way to implement governance at scale is essential. However, traditional best practices for data governance initiatives are seeing on average a less than 10% success rate. Many of our clients come to us wondering how to solve these data governance issues.

Our suggestion? Develop a product mindset around your data.

Developing a Product Mindset around Your Data

Product Management

For example, think of the reports, dashboards, and predictive models as your data products. Then consider who in your organization is responsible for building the marketplace and packaging that makes those products easy to find and utilize.

Supply Chain Management

What about the supply chain? Who is responsible for the supply chain management, ensuring that the raw data and transformations are done properly, and helping your next product team find the right data? How do these functions work together so that your customers, both internal and external, trust the data products? Make sure someone in your organization is thinking like a supply chain manager.

A Focus on the Customer

Additionally, as with product management, organizations must focus on the customers for their products.

Governance teams have traditionally focused on expanding acronyms into business terms in a data catalog, but they often forget the most important acronym for their constituents: "WIIFM", which is short for "What's in it for me?".

To add value, organizations should focus on empathizing with both the producers and consumers of their data to deeply understand how they want to work, and what they need to see to trust existing data products. They can then design new experiences for their data marketplace and data packaging to help these people achieve their goals using enterprise data products.

At Credera, we’ve seen many organizations skip this step because they didn't believe they could deliver on these expectations. That situation is changing though, as new technology enables a much more proactive, integrated approach to bring data governance into the existing ways of working within an organization.

Supply Management

Lastly, data teams should consider their supply. The supply management side includes capabilities like data testing and monitoring to provide quality control, data lineage harvesting to provide visibility into the supply chain, and data privacy and access management that provide controlled access and capture information on data consumer usage patterns.

These tools can provide additional information to your data consumers, and modern data catalogs help capture and organize this information to help them select the right data for their needs and use it effectively and efficiently.

If you want a more impactful data governance program, consider adopting this product-mindset.

Interested in learning more about creating a more impactful data governance program? Check out our latest whitepaper.

The Credera Brief

At Credera, we believe the toughest business challenges are best solved by a team—a team that works together to share knowledge to accomplish their goals.

We created The Credera Brief series to distill trends and ideas from Credera leaders and experts. These short-form videos share different insights and perspectives across the topic spectrum from MarTech and innovation to strategy and technology.

You can find the complete series on our YouTube page, or reach out to findoutmore@credera.com to continue the conversation.