Items for your Data Governance team

In order to maintain a healthy data governance team, they need to tackle the tough questions pertaining to your data security, data quality and protocols.    Lets look at some of the questions to address.

1.  How much reporting if any will happen on your source system?  Remember once you give access to the source system, it will be difficult to pry people away from that data because its "real time" 

2.  Will you allow SQL queries on your source system or just canned reports?  What about your data warehouse or ODS?  SQL queries or canned reports?

3. That begs another question.   How often will you update the warehouse with source system data.  IE. How current is your warehouse data?  Noon and close of business?  Just close of business?  

4.  When will you allow people to export data from your data warehouse?  Not times of day but will you allow your data to be exported to another system?   Remember once your data leaves your warehouse, you have just opened up another can of worms.   Your data warehouse team has just become the middle man in the equation and now you are fielding questions from a third party.  Everything from "I didn't receive all of my data" to "customer 999 is not in the data feed."

5.  How will my organization communicate changes to source system data?  For example, if I add a field to the source system, when will the data warehouse team find out about that change?  If that happens, how will it affect other system downstream from the data warehouse/ODS.?

6.  Which tools will you allow to hit the data warehouse?    Will they have table access using Tableau or will a team build Cognos/Microstrategy reports and feed them to the business to consume.

I hope that these questions have stimulated you to think about your data and placing a framework around that data to ensure data quality and integrity.

Interesting stuff from Synchrony Financial.

https://www.synchronyfinancial.com/Synchrony_Financial_BigData_IT_and_Marketing_Analytics_white_paper.pdf

We have an interesting culture at my present engagement.  The business comes to IT and wants them to develop their KPI's.    I have seen this in the past but never to this extent.   Industry wise, I think we are in this culture now of Business involvement all the way through the development process, IE Agile/Scrum.   Lets involve the business through our sprints and they set the direction of the work from IT.  Not so in this case.

So let me take this time to rant.  The business and IT must be joined together.   Collaboration with the business is key and of the utmost importance.  When I started this blog, I talked about the importance of the Business Analyst.  That person who stands between the IT and the business in order to help both sides work in harmony.   The problem is that for whatever reason, the business sometimes doesn't want to pay for that role.  Then they end up with problems. Let me say that this role can be picked up by others but the BA acts like the SME of the group.  Someone who can direct the business down the proper path for executing the best results.  If the business understands the work load, then they can help with prioritization, necessary approvals, business goals and knowledge of where they need to go as a company/organization.  

How to become a Big Data Superhero - Capgemini

How to become a Big Data Superhero - Capgemini

Informatica Marketing Data lake

https://www.informatica.com/content/dam/informatica-com/global/amer/us/collateral/analyst-report/ema-revolutionary-approaches-to-marketing-informatica-marketing-data-lake_analyst-report_3192en.pdf

Where there is no vision, the IT organization will perish

Does your organization know where it is going?   Too often we in the IT world are so busy putting out fires that we forget that we have to plan.   The inevitable Proactive vs Reactive environment.   So in order to be proactive and make plans, you need to know where you are going.   What is the plan for upgrading your infrastructure?  What is the plan for your ERP?  What is the plan for reporting?   What is the plan for security?   Do you have business units on multiple technology platforms that might need to be consolidated.   These are the kind of questions that need to be answered when looking at your plan.   That plan is called a vision statement.  What is the vision of your IT organization.  I have attached a link for a vision statement below.   If you don't have a plan for where you are going, then you might wake up one day to realize that you haven't moved or that you have moved and you are now walking in a circle.  Your upgrade path has only succeeded in giving you a larger circle.   Start with the basics and then build from there.



What Is a Vision Statement?

Microstrategy Work Fencing