The Data Asset: How Smart Companies Govern Their Data for Business Success

CHAPTER 12

Processes

Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes . . . thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before.

—BILL GATES, MICROSOFT CHAIRMAN AND FOUNDER

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

Motivating your staff to agree to and sign off on a process for managing data is critical to achieving a quality culture. A multiple-step lifecycle can provide a manageable, repeatable approach that companies can easily adopt. The lifecycle approach also need not be done on every bit of data the company has all at once. It can be executed in phases. In this chapter you will learn how to:

• Discover the importance of documenting the data in your organization and the characteristics of that data. Data discovery arms you with information about the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of your data.

• Design a single data model, a single set of business rules, and a single set of business processes.

• Enable universally agreed upon requirements that can be validated and deployed.

• Maintain the data with constant vigilance and continuous care. This is not a “do it once and you’re done” process.

• Archive data that is no longer of use to your organization or update data that ...