What are the different types of content and processes that are being engaged by data consumers at your organization? Data governance and data intelligence content could include data catalog entries, glossary definitions, information about reports/data flows, reference data, data policies, or data quality rules. Processes could include reporting data quality issues or requesting a new report. Different roles in the organization engage with this content and processes in different ways. This blog discusses what happens when staff search for content, and what happens if the staff member does not find the necessary content, the different types of folks engaging with data-related content, and how you must change the engagement for these different types of folks.
When staff is searching and discovering for content they want to know if it exists or not. If easily found and there like what they found then there is no issue. But if what they found is not what they desired, or not found, then they might (should) submit a request such as:
The challenge about points of engagement is that there is not one way to do it. All of these different types of requests may have different points of engagement, entry points or ways to access it. How do you make content searching and requests as simple as possible and as obvious as possible to the data consumers? First question is do you have a data governance / data intelligence solution implemented like the Data Cookbook where the data-related content and processes are located? And have you interfaced these points of engagement in your report tool or your ticketing system so that information is pulled from the Data Cookbook or pushes the content from the Data Cookbook out to where staff members are working so that they can engage as quickly as possible.
If you get your data consumers and requesters engaged in the Data Cookbook generating requests then that is going to dramatically drive your engagement of your subject matter experts and data stewards who are needing to process the requests. And more engagement means more content creation as the data stewards are getting data-related requests directly from data consumers rather than some list of definitions or reports that they need to create content on. A data governance solution and its use is going to dramatically improve employee satisfaction in data-related activities because what they are doing is responding to an actual issue and an actual question within your organization.
Many individuals in the organization are already doing this data stewardship without a solution like the Data Cookbook. They are doing it informally with people walking over to them, calling them or emailing them and asking these data-related questions. The difference between that and what you can be done in a solution like the Data Cookbook is that it is outside a standard process and you are not capturing the generated information for the future. By taking this request process that has happened informally and making it more formal through the Data Cookbook, the responses, information and knowledge about your data generated from those requests will get captured in the Data Cookbook. You need to determine how to insert into current or new processes the capture of this knowledge so that it both accelerates and helps with searching. You do not want three different people to ask the same question and get three different answers from scratch each time. If the subject matter experts are already answering data-related questions, then it is just a marginal additional effort for them to put it into the knowledge base so that this information is available when this same question is asked the next time.
Who are these different types of people that can engage with data governance? Think about the roles and how they are in dealing with your data or content. What is the best way for them to engage in this content? Even within those roles you have different levels of expertise and access. You might have casual or infrequent users of this data or this content.
Here are some of the different types of people that engage with data governance and data intelligence at your organization:
You should think about how to simplify things for staff and how to break through the barriers of all the different roles. Talk to them and understand how they interact with the data and make the points of engagement as easy as possible. When you implement a data governance solution, like the Data Cookbook, you usually have a large training effort across your whole organization about the solution including how to access it. But often you forget about making it easier to access by embedding it or creating links to it in the software that they use in their day-to-day job. They should be able to make report/dashboard-related requests right from the online report or dashboard. Remember that these staff members might not be having a data-related question for maybe six months or twelve months after training. They will probably forget how to access the data governance solution by then. Plus, you are going to have new people added to the organization after the initial training. Do not rely on training and reminders about using the data governance solution. With a help desk system, you might have something on the website, on the intranet, or in the employee handbook explaining how to get to it. The help desk system is more engrained in their mind the the new data governance solution. Think of a product like the Data Cookbook as a data-related help desk.
You have functional users and technical users. Their engagement with the data governance solution will be different. You do not want to have only one way for people to engage with the data and data governance that is overwhelming to some of them technically. If you are a technical person you are going to want to be able to access and look at the tables and columns. Functional users should have different points of engagement from technical users. Maybe look at different data governance points of engagement for each of the following roles: active data steward, oversight, infrequent data user and power user. Start building additional ways you want to have people access this data governance content to solve more problems in your organization and get a more data literate staff.
Hope you found this blog post beneficial to you and your organization.
IData has a solution, the Data Cookbook, that can aid the employees and the organization in its data governance, data intelligence, data stewardship and data quality initiatives. IData also has experts that can assist with data governance, reporting, integration and other technology services on an as needed basis. Feel free to contact us and let us know how we can assist.
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