GROW

Transcript: Hi. I’m Robert Sidick from First CDO Partners. In her second book, A Culture of Governance, Morgan Templar introduces readers to the GOVERN framework. While her first book walked you through setting up a Data Governance organization, this one was designed to help those who have a governance program but want to get more out of it. As the name hints at, it is about generating renewed excitement for data throughout your company and really embedding data thinking and data governance into your culture. Today, I’d like to start with the first part of the framework – Growing your data program. Before I get too far into this, you can download the “Grow” chapter from A Culture of Governance for free at our website. I will link it below. What “growing” means will vary from company to company. Data governance at some companies may have a small footprint, so expanding those processes into other systems or data domains would be a smart way to grow that program. At more data-mature companies, they have all their critical data domains and systems covered, but there’s always gaps and more value that can be captured. Now, some gaps are probably ok. If the data owner has decided thoughtfully to not govern certain information, that’s fine. However, that decision should be reevaluated over time, perhaps annually, to make sure that this isn’t data that could be used for AI or automation because you will NOT want to feed ungoverned data into these processes or products. So, let’s say you run the Data Office of a company that has a good handle on its structured data. This is already an enviable position. Everything seems to be fine, but you know there’s more value that your team can provide. So where could you look for it? Here’s a hint – look at where lawyers will go during a lawsuit. Their e-discovery tools will find your known, governed data. But there’s no surprises there because it’s properly governed. Then they will come across your known “Unknown” data – this is your island of misfit toys. Perhaps retired datastores that are still hanging around or server logs. But in short order they’ll get to what probably comprises 90% of your data – the Dark Data. This is data like chat logs and emails and email attachments. They’re memes that you send around – maybe hilarious or cringy – they’re PDF files. They’re Excel and Word files on everyone’s corporate laptops or file shares. It’s old backup files and test data full of unencrypted PII. In other words - this is where the juicy stuff is for lawyers, hackers, or even a curious employee. Every big company is sitting on a mountain of dark data representing an unknown liability. So how can you turn this liability into a superpower? By starting to govern some of this data. There are tools that can shine a light on this dark data. This data can be profiled and classified. You can identify the data that, if governed, could provide the most value or at least reduce the most risk. Begin to apply your data policies to these areas, including retention policies. And after you’ve moved some of your highest risk, unstructured or semi-structured data into the “Known Data” category, publicize this win throughout the organization. Demonstrate the value your data program’s creating. Perhaps now formerly neglected customer service notes can be utilized to create a self-service chatbot for you and your team or maybe your customers. Imagine that – forgotten data that was hiding in the shadows is now strutting its stuff for your customers; you created value from what was worth less than nothing previously. Or maybe you just purged many terabytes of data that was beyond its retention period, saving storage costs and ridding the company of data that was of no value or even more dangerous - a liability. This is just one of many ways to grow your data program. If you’d like to learn more, let me know in the comments and maybe we’ll make another Grow video before covering other parts of the framework. If you’d like to talk about how First CDO Partners can help you, contact us through our website at FirstCDO.com or feel free to message me here. Thank you, and let’s do this again sometime.