What I love about your posts is the insiders perspective. You’re not quoting from methodologies or text books, it’s “warts and all” experience.

Totally agree with your comments about widening your support group. I’ve seen a lot of personal crusaders, hell I was one once, and it can all fall apart if budget cuts are looming with no-one to fight your corner.

I get your point about revenue. Shareholder perception is often impacted by falling revenues so it pays to protect this but I do think the cost reduction ticket is an evergreen driver to focus on. If executives are witnessing budget cuts anything you can do to strengthen their finances will surely be popular and sometimes revenue generation can take a long time and a convoluted path to flow back into the domain of the executive.

My only other addition to this would be to have several presentations of varying length so you can get to the point as quickly as 3 minutes if required. Sure, have the stats and evidence to dig deeper if required but I’ve sat in on a lot of these type of presentations which just labour on and present way too much information. You need to have that killer hook that can be delivered in the corridor, at the watercooler, anywhere you meet senior sponsors.

Also, really like your point about having data governance focus on one mission critical problem as opposed to just being some blanket methodology which can sometimes get diluted at exec level.

Great content Mark, always look forward to your posts landing in my Inbox.

I think that my favorite line is: “If you are the only one who believes your work is necessary, then it’s not.”

All too often, the rallying cry for an important program like data governance comes from one person’s trumpeting their personal crusade. Although that might seem noble and laudable, if you are an army of one, then everyone will gladly let you be the martyr of your own cause – because it was only your cause.

I wholeheartedly agree with your advice: “You must build relationships with the teams you work with…”

For anyone’s data governance program to be successful, you must search out and find the others in your organization who are screaming into the abyss of (to paraphrase you) the longstanding business problems that data governance can help resolve.

Build your army, plan your attack, and always be ready to adapt – I think that about exhausts my clichés for today.

But seriously, thanks for providing some great data governance advice.

Best Regards…

Jim

Fantastic to see such fresh opportunities across new media and the cloud for the DQ/DG profession, v.exciting times.

Good point Henrik. My only experience with SOHOs is for the combined householding needed for banking. One of the banks I worked with (while building Marketing systems at Harte-Hanks) was interested in householding personal accounts with SOHO business accounts. That led to a hybrid matching approach which was challenging to implement. We spent a lot of time tuing the matching logic during the QA phase to meet the customers expectations.

In relation to the post, I think a SOHO would fall more into the transactional side of things (ecommerce or telemarketing) so it would probably look more like Consumer. I assume that was your point. I know that some firmagraphic vendors are better than others at identifying SOHOs.

Thanks for weighing in.
Mark

They may create problems when say you only will work with the C’s – but there are B’s in your population not easily detected because they are SOHO’s – and off course also the other way around.

But the SOHO’s also are an interesting group for sales and marketing as they purchase some services for both the B and C role. Examples are financing, insurance, telecommunication, real estate. Here you want to combine demographic and firmagraphic appends – and you need to build the relationship between the household and the business.