Imagine hearing from your Chief Data Steward -- during your first Data Stewards Council meeting -- that the results of one council discussion had paid for an entire year of program expenses!
That's what happened at a very large lending organization that asked the Data Governance Institute to help them design a Data Governance program and also to facilitate a JAD session to examine a set of legacy issues with data needed to meet marketing goals.
We took an unconventional approach. Rather than beginning with the introduction of a "hypothetical" Data Governance program and asking stakeholders for support and participation, we decided to conduct the JAD session using governance principles and processes, then tell participants that they'd just successfully "done" governance.
Using the DGI Data Governance Framework, we prepared by working in the background with their Data Architecture (DA) and Project Management Office (PMO) leaders to design a program that would initially focus on reacting to legacy issues associated with data architecture, integration, and quality. The program would be designed to grow, with the second phase addressing both proactive information quality and addressing specific data-related challenges faced by teams acquiring loan portfolios.
We went into the JAD session with a clear picture of roles, responsibilities, proposed decision rights, an understanding of how Data Governance would impact the work of data modelers, and an understanding of near-term and long-term impacts on the organization's Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). With the blessing of leadership from the PMO, DA, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and key IT stakeholders, we conducted the JAD session with two sets of scribes in attendance: one to scribe the issues addressed by the assembled participants, and one to scribe governance activities. We introduced both to the participants, and said we'd talk about governance after we'd addressed what they'd come there to accomplish.
That discussion came sooner than expected. The group addressed a tricky problem that required many members to produce "pieces of the puzzle." Once the puzzle was assembled, marketing had an easy solution to a long-standing problem -- a solution that would generate considerable revenue. This was more than enough to pay for Data Stewardship Council meetings and associated research/analysis for a year -- and this was just one of many "issues" the council was going to address during this session.
At that point, we described to the group the governance principles and practices we'd been exercising with them to get to this successful point, and we told the participants to expect invitations to become Enterprise Data Stewards. To this day that organization's Data Governance program has enthusiastic, engaged participants who tell senior leadership about what a good "investment" Data Governance is for their organization.
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