Chapter 5 Best-Practice Development and Critical Analysis

In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, Stephen Covey emphasizes to “begin with the end in mind” as one of the habits. Starting with the end in mind isn’t just a habit of highly successful people; it’s also a habit of successful organizations.

Look at it this way: It makes sense to build an action plan before you try to accomplish anything. Mapquest.com can give you directions only if you begin with the end in mind and tell it where you are heading. When building an action plan for a data governance program, it makes sense to map out what you want to accomplish, what the future state will look like, and the future behaviors of the organization. All of which brings us to data governance best practices.

Data governance best practices form the basis and guideline for the execution of a data governance program. Organizations that successfully implement data governance programs begin by defining a limited series of best practices. Once they define their best practices, they complete a gap-risk assessment to identify the differences (gap) between what they define as data governance best practices and present practices and the current and potential risks associated with the gap. Just as important, they define an action plan for delivering the data governance program.

Define Best Practices

When defining best practices, use these two criteria to determine if something is a best practice for your organization:

1. Is the best practice practical and possible to implement given your situation?
2. Will the program be at risk if the best practice isn’t accomplished?

You must be able to answer “yes” to these two questions for the practice to be considered a best practice. Keep this in mind as you read the few sample best practices below. Consider whether or not these sample questions would be answered “yes” by your organization. Perhaps the sample best practices could be considered best practices for your organization.

Sample Best Practices

The examples below of best practice statements occur repeatedly with organizations across industries:

• For data governance to be successful, senior management supports, sponsors, and understands the activities of the data governance team, the roles defined in the data governance operating model, and specific examples of where data governance will add value.
• Staff members are committed to the definition, development, execution, and sustainability of the data governance program on a continual basis.
• Data governance principles are applied consistently and continuously to data that are defined, produced, and used for enterprise reporting.
• The goals, scope, expectations, measurements of success, and roles and responsibilities of the data governance program are well defined and communicated with information technology, strategic business units, and shared corporate functions.

Think about these statements in terms of the criteria shared in the Best Practices section. For the first sample best practice, you might ask, “Is it practical and doable that we can get the high level of senior management to support and understand data governance?” For the first best practice you would also ask, “Will our data governance program be at risk if we don’t have senior management’s support and understanding?”

The answer to these questions should be “yes.” It’s possible to educate senior management. Just as important, you place yourself at risk if you don’t have senior management’s support. These two criteria are important in the definition of data governance best practices for your organization.

Perform Discovery by Conducting Interviews and Meetings

It’s important to review the best practices and to see where your organization stands in comparison with them, especially with business and technical people within your organization. The best way to complete this discovery process is through interviews and question-and-answer sessions with a fair representation of business management people who’ll be identified as data stewards and IT management.

Distribute your best practices to the appropriate people before meetings to offer them an opportunity to form an opinion, whether positive or negative. Remember that best practices should be easy to understand and agreed upon. Doing so will provide a good starting place for your meeting and will reduce the time needed for the meeting.

It’s important to note that if you write best practices so that people can answer “yes” to the questions, you’ll likely get suggestions on how to reword the practices instead of negative feedback. The best practices should be no-brainers to understand and agree to. It is often helpful to include the three questions when you distribute the best practices for review before the meeting.

During your meetings, ask participants to tell you what they believe the organization or their parts of the organization are presently doing that supports the best practices. Also, ask them what they believe is impeding the ability to follow the best practices and where room exists for reasonable opportunities to improve. This will feed into the next steps of the assessment.

Record Strengths

This seems rather obvious, but it’s worthy of a brief mention. Leveraging the strengths you find in the discovery step is important. The focus is to identify and record activities of stewards and processes that support the best practices you’ve defined for your organization. The recording aspect is critical because:

1. You can use the recorded strengths as a solid starting point. If people are already performing the role of data steward, let’s not change that. Where processes support the defined best practices, let’s not change these either. The list of strengths can be a starting point for discussion with people who’ll become data stewards and to assure people that they needn’t feel threatened by future data governance behavior.
2. Recordings of the strengths can demonstrate and sell senior management that a basis of data governance is already in place and that the action plan—the last step—won’t change things that need not be changed. As the English author and politician Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland, once said, “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

Record Opportunities to Improve

The term “opportunity to improve” is often considered the politically correct way to describe “weaknesses in our present environment.” Actually, it says more than that. Opportunity to improve articulates the specific areas to address that don’t align with the best practices you’ve defined. Recording areas where improvement is necessary will play an important role in the development of your action plan. And your action plan will consist of the steps to follow to address opportunities to improve.

Report the Gaps

This is another important step. Use the information collected and recorded in the previous two steps to report the gap between your present environment and the best practice environment communicated earlier. This may seem obvious, but because some companies seem to prefer the ready-fire-aim approach, I thought this worth mentioning.

Make certain to report the gaps in a positive way. Certainly, make mention of the specific strengths in this report, and sell the idea that taking advantage of the opportunities mentioned in the previous step is exactly that—opportunities for your organization to become better at managing its data.

Report the Risks

This is another, critical step. Most senior managers will quickly focus on risks, and these may likely be what they first want to assess: “Where are the gaps in our risk management program? In the areas of compliance? Security? Privacy? Identity theft? Record retention? Disaster recovery?”

Knowing where you organization is at risk, or even speculating where your organization might be at risk, can be an important contributor to the questions you ask of the business and technical people in your organization during the discovery step. This can also be a major contributor to the effort to sell senior management on the key concepts of data governance and the need to formalize a data governance program.

Prepare the Action Plan

At this point, you’ve defined data governance best practices for your organization and have identified what you’re doing to support the best practices. You’ve identified the opportunities for your organization to improve, reported the gaps between where you are and where you are going, and articulated the risks associated with the gaps. The action plan should practically write itself, right?

Well, it’s not necessarily that easy. The action plan should include doable steps that address the opportunities to improve. These steps should be prioritized, communicated, and resourced. Consider tying the planned steps back to the rest of the assessment report.

The action plan should be written to accentuate the positive. Your organization should be able to achieve the action plan given the present, resource situation, and activities of your organization. The action plan must be communicated to the stakeholders in the governing of data in your organization—basically everybody. The action plan must be followed, and the results of following the plan must be communicated as well.

Final Thoughts on Best Practices

As I mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, it’s smart to begin with the end in mind. Best practices establish the beginning and the end. They set practical target behaviors that the organization must achieve for the data governance program to become a sustainable success.

Keep these three tips and techniques in mind for establishing best practices and completing the critical analysis and assessment:

1. Do not mince words. Organizations following the non-invasive approach to data governance purposely minimize the number of words they include in each best practice. Be sure to eliminate fluff words or words that deflect from the real meaning of each practice. Some organizations focus on the task at hand, such as protecting data, improving quality, or improving analytics, when they define their best practices.
2. No time like the present. Writing in the present tense is the most effective way to describe best practices. That’s because each best practice is a present-state benchmark for beginning your assessment and should describe the practice the organization sets out to achieve. A best practice written in the future tense, including words like “to,” “will,” or “must,” describes a future behavior that implies the best practice is not being followed at the present time. Earlier in the chapter I stated that to follow the Non-Invasive Data Governance approach, the assessment must first articulate present, leverageable activities (strengths) that support the best practice before articulating the opportunities to improve (weaknesses).
3. Underline to underscore. Best practices are often the tool used to introduce an organization to the behavioral aspects of the Non-Invasive Data Governance approach. In introducing this approach, unfamiliar words are used in communicating to the people of the organization. A best practice critical analysis and assessment should define these terms in simple language that the business and technical communities understand. Consider underlining the words in the best practices that may be new to those who read the best practices and assessment. Provide a glossary of these underlined terms.

Key Points The steps to a best practice assessment include: Define best practices. Perform discovery. Record strengths. Record opportunities to improve. Report the gaps. Report the risks. Prepare the action plan. There are two criteria for determining if something is a data governance best practice for your organization: Is the best practice practical and possible to implement given your situation? Will the program be at risk if the best practice is not accomplished? Remember: do not mince words, there is no time like the present, and underline to underscore.