By defining and committing to best practices within the Mindful DG Initiative is critical to the success of the initiative for your business. To help build your best practices for your Mindful DG Initiative think of the final results and what that looks like. Knowing what that final results and goals looks like ensures that the path you select to get there is correct. Here are some sample goals and results:
Improve data security
Remove the collection of duplicate data
Use data to increase business profits
Make consistent, confident business decisions based on trustworthy data aligned with all the various purposes for the use of the data assets within the enterprise
These are just some examples of goals that you might be thinking about as a final result for the Mindful DG initiative. It is a very good exercise to go through and I do highly recommend that you do it, as it will give you a good vision of what the initiative will accomplish at the end.
Define your best practices for your business: When going thru your best practices and deciding on which best practices that need to be in place for your business ask yourself two questions when deciding. Is the practice applicable to do and can it be done in my business? Will the Mindful DG Initiative be at risk if the best practice is not done?
If you do not answer yes to both of these questions then the practice that you are defining is not a best practice and should not be implemented in your business. Remember businesses will share some best practices but not all best practices will work for every business. Some questions to be asked about best practices that might be put into place at your business.
Will the lack of communication and buy in by the Senior management cause the initiative to not be successful?
Will are Data governance be at risk if Senior management does not support or buy into DG Initiative?
Data Governance principals will be established and used daily through out the business?
If we do not establish quantifiable measurements will the DG initiative be successful?
The best way to complete the process of building best practices is conducting interviews of managers in the different business departments. Involving them early in the best practices not only gives them the feeling that they are part of the initiative but they are helping build the initiative which gives them more feelings of ownership. Prior to meeting with them, one of the best things you can do is forward any best practices that you already have in place, as well as the two questions that you should answer yes to in order a statement to become a best practice. This will help keep your meetings short and focused.
Once you have the best practices in place you can start to implement them in phases, remember we want to convert the nonstandard data governance to a formal data governance. Not only will this help you see how your best practices are working quickly but will also allow you to evaluate them and see if they need to be improved.