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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.
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