Innovative Ways to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Data Management Program

It doesn’t seem that long ago that forward-looking articles touted the day when we would have access to all the information (in-fer-mey-shuhn: what we called “data” pre-2000 AD) we could ever possibly want or even knew we needed. Fast forward 20 years, the amount of data generated every minute (2.5 quintillion bytes estimates Voucher Cloud) spans far beyond the amounts anyone could ever fathom was possible (or needed…or wanted). We’re living in a world flooded by data and we’re spending more time sifting through the data, fixing it, managing it, storing it, etc. than using it. There must be a better way!

Most data governance and data management programs are well-intentioned and seek similar outcomes: Ensure data is available, accurate, timely, and accessible so that critical business decisions can be made swiftly using insights gained from that data. 

However, the reality is that these programs end up rolling out onerous committees, layers of policies, complex decision workflows, and convoluted data issue resolution paths. This administrative overhead is imposed onto a sea of disengaged data stewards who’ve likely been “voluntold” of their stewardship responsibilities.

So how do we fix it?

Here are some ideas (let’s push the envelope a bit):

1. Declutter the governance process: Crowdsource the stewardship responsibilities. Why “volunteer” people into these defined roles when you can have everyone contribute to the quality of enterprise data? Hey, before you knock it, it works for Wikipedia, Waze, and many others. Truly putting the control into the hands of the power users will quickly increase engagement, increase ownership, and lead to higher adoption of the data management tools available.

2. Buy your data! Are you spending your budget dollars to customize and manage value-added datasets that give you an edge, or are you sinking it into creating and governing commoditized datasets that are available off the shelf from a vendor? Buy as much data as you can and transfer the governance and data management responsibility to those vendors. Focus on proprietary data that will add value to your processes providing unique insights needed to succeed.

3. Simplify but tailor solutions: This sounds like mutually exclusive activities—but it’s what the people want—and the most important point in this article. Notice I said to create tailored solutions and not customized ones. This is an important distinction: A world with endless possibilities fosters indecision and lower satisfaction rates.

Think of home audio equipment. Home stereo systems reached a pinnacle in the 80s and 90s with racks of dedicated systems: endless settings and systems difficult to use without training. We all knew someone with a setup like the one on the left. You spent half the time figuring out how to change the source from tape to CD, then the other half of the time adjusting the sound settings for the specific song to sound “perfect.”

Today, a speaker like the one to the right produces audio of similar (and perhaps better) quality than the setup above. It has three buttons and one cord (the power cord). It tunes the sound output itself and just works. An infinitely less complex solution that still meets, or exceeds, the listener’s expectations. Giving the users too many options to customize their data leads to the same fatigue we saw with home audio systems. Give them something tailored to their needs that just works.

These three points all revolve around the theme of simplifying data governance and data management. Ditch the stuff you don’t need. Declutter your processes. Focus on data management activities on datasets that will yield unique insights that will give you a competitive advantage. And most importantly, provide users with solutions that work—at the click of a button.