This blog post will show you how to evaluate your data governance (also referred to as data intelligence) processes so that they can be improved, thus improving the organization’s efficiency and effectiveness. You need to determine the importance of each process and its effectiveness so that improvement efforts can be prioritized. Periodically (say once a year), look at the big picture regarding data governance. Understand the staff’s perception of each data governance process’ importance and effectiveness. Review the data governance processes that exist or should exist. These include data request process, data quality issue and resolution process, data quality assessment process, data governance communication process, data definition process, etc. Decide on the tasks to improve the identified processes. Communicate the rationale behind your decisions regarding data governance processes.
To improve your data governance processes, do the following:
- People - Make a list of data governance folks at your organization (the data stewards if you have them) that are affected by the data governance processes.
- Process - Make a list of the data governance processes with a short description.
- Scale - Create a point system to evaluate process importance and process effectiveness.
For the importance scale we suggest the following:
- No importance (Zero to 6.9)
- Limited importance (7.0 to 7.9)
- Significant importance (8.0 to 8.9)
- Critical Importance (9.0 to 10.0)
For the effective scale we suggest the following:
- Not in place/not effective (Zero to 4.9)
- Somewhat ineffective (5.0 to 5.9)
- Somewhat effective (6.0 to 6.9)
- Effective (7.0 to 10.0)
- Survey - Create a survey of the processes (list from #2) and send out to data governance folks (list from #1) asking for their opinion (using scale from #3) on the importance and effectiveness of the processes. Instruct the survey takers that they should only have one process noted as critical. Give the survey takers about 2 weeks to fill out the survey.
- Review- After the survey results are back in, see which data governance processes your staff have deemed to be the most and least important. See which data governance processes your staff have deemed most and least effective. Validate their assessment. Take the results and review them to see if there are any major differences in opinion. Evaluate which data governance processes your staff disagreed on the most. Discuss disagreements and build alignment.
- Grid and Summarize – Once survey is reviewed, create a grid with importance on the left axis (0 to 10) and effectiveness on the bottom axis (0 to 10). Take the results of the survey and place them on the grid depending on their ranking for importance and effectiveness.
Break the grid down into 4 quadrants:
- Upper Left – High Importance / Low Effectiveness - Improve Process Immediately – create a plan of attack to improve as this will have the greatest impact to the institution
- Lower Left – Low Importance / Low Effectiveness - Evaluate Process
- Upper Right – High Importance / High Effectiveness - Leverage Process
- Lower Right – Low Importance / High Effectiveness - Maintain Process
- Plan – Look at the upper left quadrant and work with the team to determine the plan to improve data governance processes. Work on optimizing these most important processes first. Evaluate the processes in the lower left of the grid. Leverage the processes in the upper right of the grid. Maintain the processes in the lower right of the grid.
- Communicate – To the necessary folks, especially the people that filled out the survey, communicate the results of the survey and the plan for process improvements. It takes a team to improve processes.
At the end of this evaluation you should have:
- Better alignment of staff on data governance process importance and effectiveness
- List of data governance processes to focus on and improve in the near term
- List of actionable tasks for each process improvement
Hope this blog post was beneficial to you and your institution. IData has a solution, the Data Cookbook, that can aid the employees and the organization in its data governance, 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.
(image credit StockSnap_GSBJXWRSDV_Xray_EvaluateProcesses_BP #1008)