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Expert Briefing | Association Insights STAGE 5 – ORGANISE THE BUSINESS & IT TO DELIVER & SUSTAIN THE IMPROVEMENTS Having designed the changes, you are now ready to implement them. A few important tips: •R  emember that data improvement projects are business change projects and so are subject to the usual principles, disciplines & practices of project management. This includes the creation of a project board, the appointment of a project manager, progress reporting, risk management and so on. •E  ven more critical, however, is the need to engage business stakeholders in a way that they take active and longer term responsibility for the improvement of the data. This is essential both to implement and sustain the improvements. And this is where the emerging discipline of Data Governance has a key role to play. Data Governance is a business function, designed to ensure that the business assigns clear individual responsibility and accountability for its data. Its synergy with data quality is shown here at Figure 2: STAGE 6 – DELIVER THE BENEFITS As the improvement projects are delivered, the benefits accrued should be tracked and reported on. A few final tips: •W  hen completing any data improvement project review what went well and can be reapplied and reused in further projects, and what might have been better. Ensure the lessons learnt are shared and put into practice in the next improvement project. •A  fter any successful project create and communicate a short, business friendly case study. This will help to promote its benefits and value, and retain support for data improvement across your organisation. •A  fter the project has ended continue to report on the data improvements delivered & planned through business as usual data governance reporting mechanisms. Figure 2: Data Quality Improvement & Data Governance •U  sing the principles of Data Governance, each business data item or record is assigned to a named individual, often designated a data owner and / or data steward. They should play a key role in the projects delivering the initial improvements and ensuring the benefits are sustained by stewarding the data as part of business as usual processes. Nigel Turner Principal Consultant Global Data Strategy [email protected] Nigel is Principal Information Management Consultant at Global Data Strategy, a global business and IT consultancy practice. Before this he held senior data governance and data quality improvement consultancy roles at FromHereOn, IPL and Trillium Software. As a consultant he has helped over 150 organisations tackle their data quality and data governance challenges, including British Gas, Telefonica O2, EDF Energy, CIPD, Severn Trent Water, Intel & First Great Western. Nigel spent the majority of his career at BT Group, where he led internal data quality improvement programmes and later managed a commercial, externally focused BT Information Management practice. www.associationsnetwork.org In summary, I believe that adapting this proven six‑stage approach to CRM data quality improvement will reap rewards. As a final plea, don’t invest in new CRM technologies or processes without making a parallel investment in data improvement. Data improvement may only constitute 20% of the cost and effort, but I would wager that it could solve 80% of your CRM problems. Why not give 80-20 a try? It worked for Pareto. © Associations Network 2015 | 27