A Data Governance Horror Story!

This little tale is a pivot from the standard weekly article. Enjoy!

Once upon a time, there was a credit union that had no data governance. It was a dark place where data ran unharnessed, running wild with not a data dictionary to be found! The leaders of this credit union were literally in the dark about their data. They would try with all their might to wrangle it into an excel report. But because of the unkempt status of the data, the leaders could not tell if they had clean or even correct data. It was a real mess.

One time, the leaders attempted to take their reports and connect them, hoping this would create valuable insights from which they could create action. But these efforts were to no avail. They were simply, just messy direct squished-up data in excel.

One day, a mighty team of data educators came across this credit union and, seeing the hot mess of data, wasted no time, and sprung into action.

They started by searching for the elusive use case, the business problem the credit union was hoping to use data to solve. They found it buried in a storeroom behind a bunch of boxes marked auto loan promo '92. They shook it out, cleaned it up, and brought it out to the leadership team. They all agreed that this was indeed the use case they wanted and thought it had been lost forever and were happily reunited.

Next, the team of data educators and the use case looked for all the data they needed to help solve the use case. The data was still elusive and downright obstructive. Put up quite a fight! Some data hid, some data was just difficult, and one bit of transaction data even decided to fight dirty and attempted to bite the use case. But the use case and the data educators were eventually victorious! They organized, categorized, and prioritized the data, captured all this insight into a data dictionary, created an audit to maintain quality, and built policies and procedures to make certain the data could get wild again.

The moral of this story is clean data today, bright data future tomorrow!

We all know the struggle is real with data governance if you are looking for easy-to-understand and, more importantly, quick to implement foundational data governance. We've got your back. No data is an island #inthistogether

Posted by Anne Legg
THRIVE

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