This is the third blog post in a series of blog posts geared towards addressing “Why, What and How?” of getting executive sponsorship for data governance initiatives. In my last post Data Governance Litmus Test: Know thy KPIs I explored importance of knowing KPIs to be able to build link between data governance initiatives outcomes and the organizational strategy. In this post I’m going to explore why it is important to know specific goals of the KPIs which are monitored on periodic basis by executives towards fulfilling organizational strategy.
Data governance initiatives typically will span multiple organizations, key business processes, heterogeneous systems/applications and several people from different lines of businesses. Any time when one is dealing with such a complex composition of players and stakeholders, it is extremely crucial to be articulate about business goals and the impact of the actions on hand on the goals. Once people understand the magnitude of impact, and how they will be responsible for such an impact, getting their co-operation, alignment becomes relatively easy.
Once you understand the KPIs which are important organizationally, you need to drill down one level below to understand what specific goals are important? The process of understanding specific goals will undoubtedly reveal many contributing factors to the fulfillment of the overall goals.
For example:
If one of the major KPIs which executives are tracking is overall spend. At this stage it is important for the data governance initiative team to understand specific goals around this KPI. For example the specifics goals around this KPI could be:
1. Chief procurement officer has been asked to reduce spend by 2% within four quarters
2. 2% reduction across the board represents $80 million savings.
3. This savings alone would allow organization to improve its profitability by almost a penny per share. This ultimately will reflect positively in share price improvement and will benefit all the employees of the organization.
Once such details are known, establishing a dialogue with chief procurement officer and his/her key advisers might further reveal that
1. Their focus is going to be in three specific areas (specific products/raw materials)
2. Not having singular view of suppliers is a key concern. Because of this issue they are not able to negotiate consistent pricing contracts with the suppliers. They believe that streamlining contracts based on overall spend with suppliers; their subsidiaries will help them achieve more than 70% of their goal.
3. Supplier contracts are not being returned consistently resulting in higher costs in terms of minimum business guarantees and price point guarantees.
Equipped with this information, it will be much easier for data governance team to highlight and link their efforts to overall goal of reducing spend. For example, with some of this information gathered, one can already pinpoint that teams which are working with suppliers/supplier development, contract negotiations, pricing etc…. are going to be critical to get on board data governance with this initiative. Also, it is clear from these nuggets of information that the overall spend, number of suppliers, number of materials/products being procured will be some of the key metrics and interrelationship between those metrics will be critical to link any ROI from initiatives to clean supplier data, build supplier MDM etc…
With this information data governance team now can not only communicate to their team members but also the executives, that X percent of duplicate data in supplier master would potentially represent Y dollars off excessive spend. Data governance team will be able to explain not only how this can be fixed but what is required to maintain this hygiene on an ongoing basis because of the impact it will have on overall excess spend.
In summary, it is really important to understand the goals behind “what?” of the organizational strategy. Other indirect benefits of this kind of exercise are
1. Establish communication and contacts with the business stakeholders.
2. Understand areas where you can focus upfront for the highest impact.
3. Understand and learn the language which you could use to effectively communicate ROI of data governance back to the executives.
In my next post, I will explore who is behind putting together these KPIs for executive in the current situation. These people are ‘the most critical’ players in the Data Governance team at both execution and implementation levels as the initiatives are kicked off.
Previous posts on this or related topics:
Litmus Test for Data Governance Initiatives: What do you need to do to garner executive sponsorship?
Data Governance Litmus Test: Know thy KPIs
Suggested next posts:
Data Governance Litmus Test: How and who is putting together metrics/KPIs for executives?
Data Governance Litmus Test: Do You Have Access to the Artifacts Used by Executives?
Business Intelligence: Process, People and Products 