Why Aligning Data Governance with Corporate Strategy is Essential

An interesting question I’ve been asked a few times is whether or not you need to worry about corporate strategy when focusing on Data Governance. This is a really great query and one which I’m going to answer very honestly.

When I first started data governance, I didn’t give corporate strategy a second thought.

The first few years that I was doing Data Governance, I didn’t think about the corporate strategy of the organisation I was working for. I felt it just wasn’t relevant to me as a Data Governance Manager because clearly, I needed to be getting on with designing a Data Governance framework and starting to roll out Data Governance. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I realised that I had totally missed the point — I needed to align ALL my activities with the corporate strategy.

The key to success

For me, not aligning with the corporate strategy led to limited and unsustainable successes. Senior stakeholders were just not interested in the issues I decided to fix and so they didn’t engage with or support my efforts. Instead, I found the key to success of a Data Governance initiative is bringing along senior stakeholders and keeping them engaged. The only way to do this is to focus on the things that interest them — delivering things that will help achieve the corporate strategy objectives that they are responsible for.

Talking to stakeholders about how Data Governance can help achieve these objectives changes the narrative. It’s not about best practice or doing Data Governance because it’s trendy, it’s about aligning it with organisational objectives.

Top Tips

It’s vital not to miss out on the alignment between data governance and corporate strategy. Here’s my top 4 ways you can ensure you stay on track.

1. Spend time early on in your Data Governance journey to understand your organisation’s corporate strategy and how Data Governance can support achieving them. You can achieve this by engaging with key stakeholders to gain insights into the organisation’s goals. For example, if a corporate objective is to reduce costs by a certain percentage, Data Governance can play a significant role in achieving that by addressing issues like rework, mistakes and inefficiencies caused by poor data management.
2. Assess whether your data is currently good enough to help meet corporate objectives. If the strategy says that you are going to review current customers/sectors and withdraw from certain ones, is your data good enough to make sure that the right decisions are made?
3. Check in periodically with your Data Governance framework to ensure it focuses on the right things. Corporate strategies change and you need to make sure that your Data Governance Framework and approach evolves to continue to support the needs of your organisation. In order to gain senior stakeholder buy-in and ongoing engagement we need to help them achieve their strategic objectives.
4. Corporate strategy is not someone else’s problem; it’s integral to the success of Data Governance.

To summarise

Aligning Data Governance with corporate strategy is essential for success. Learn from my past mistakes and take time to work through and align your Data Governance approach with your organisation’s corporate strategy.

If you would like help aligning your Data Governance approach with your corporate strategy, which not book a call using the button below to find out how I can support you?