Data Governance Owners and Stewards Meetings

Season 3 Episode 7

Welcome to Season 3 of the Law Firm Data Governance podcast. I’m CJ Anderson, founder of Iron Carrot and I’m excited to share more of what I’ve learned in my 20-plus years of working with information and data in law firms.

In this third season: “be the best data governance lead you can be”, I move beyond the ‘what’ of season one and the ‘why’ of season two by introducing some of the ‘how’ and the ‘who’.

Over the 10 episodes in this season, I’ll share what I’ve learned about using a bottom-up approach to achieve your data governance deliverables. I will be talking you through the specific skills and knowledge that can help you be a successful law firm data governance lead.

The Iron Carrot definition of Data Governance is that it is the framework that enables conversations between the right people to improve the Firm’s strategic data management. In this episode, we’ll explore the people and conversations you’ll need to enable in your role as your firm’s data governance lead.

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Episode Transcript

The iron carrot definition of data governance is that it is the framework that enables conversations between the right people to improve the firm’s strategic data management.

In this episode, we’ll explore the people and conversations you’ll need to enable you in your role as your firm’s data governance lead. I’m going to focus on data owners and data stewards. They are your essential groups of people because they will be involved in most of these conversations.

My favourite question for hiring a data governance manager or enterprise data steward is “how do you think you’ll spend most of your time in this role?”. It’s a brilliant screener question which helps you find candidates with the right approach and a clear understanding of their purpose. The best candidates understand that data governance managers listen more than they talk.

Their role is to empower the data stewards. Often that means just turning up to meetings and saying nothing. In Season One, Episode Three, I talked about the definitions of and the differences between data owners and data stewards. Remember that these terms are just standard labels for these concepts. You should call them whatever works for your firm.

A data owner is a person who makes decisions about the data. These decisions include requests to change, data usage, make data quality improvements, and who was involved in managing that data. They also make decisions about solving issues that require resources such as money, time, or people.

These are all accountabilities, and their decisions are tactical.

A data steward knows what their data is supposed to represent, what it means, and what business rules are associated with the data. They are usually the first to hear about issues with their data, and after investigating the problem and identifying a solution, they make recommendations to the data owner. These are all responsibilities, and their decisions are operational.

It is easy to assume that the stakeholders who previously worked with to create the data governance road map will be members of your framework groups. And while this is probably true in some cases, it would undermine all that work you did when defining the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities.

Start at the top down. Convene each group and get them to review the roles for the group below and suggest the right people to include as members. Remember, some nominated people might not agree to participate or might recommend a more appropriate team member to be involved.

Once you are confident that you have a group membership, remember to train them in their new role and explain how the framework will work. They will also need to understand what is expected of them and how you need them to do things differently.

It’s unusual to find a law firm data governance initiative that doesn’t have better cross functional working as one of its strategic drivers. In the first few months of your framework group meetings, your focus is data governance lead should be on building trust between the various group members.

Consider topics of conversation that will help the SMEs get to know each other. If you plan engagement properly, their active participation in workshops and agreement on shared objectives will start breaking down functional silos.

In one experience, even before the road map was complete, we heard stories of the SMEs picking up the phone to each other to talk about a data problem rather than just logging a ticket with IT support.

In nearly every conversation I have about data governance, someone will mention that they aren’t seeing the adoption and traction they expected after implementing a data governance framework.

Their complaint usually sounds something like: “We’ve got all these people identified as data owners or data stewards, but none of them will talk to each other”. Unfortunately, communication tends to be transactional, as in “I need you to do X” and not collegiate such as, “How can we fix X together?”.

This lack of collaborative problem-solving means that the drive for change and the collective wisdom of a law firm’s people is missing from its data initiatives. Consequently, no one can make progress with data related projects and improvements.

Data owners lean towards giving precedence to functional priorities over the demands of another team or any additional initiative. Which is how they often perceive data governance. Data stewards often feel that C-Suite stakeholders do not understand the impact to the firm of what they’re asking. The data stewards may ignore their leaders buy-in to data governance because they perceive it to be too disruptive.

Since data owners often rely on the inputs of their stewards when participating in a discussion or making a decision, this amplifies the challenge. The effect of these perceptions is a stagnation of data governance activities, which can cause an embryonic data governance function to lose the support of senior stakeholders; if their teams don’t see data governance as strategic, tactical, or operational value, why should they, the senior stakeholders, support something that doesn’t benefit anyone.

When implementing a data governance road map, you ignore the significant influence that data stewards have on the firm at your peril.

If you get the engagement with this data stewards right, their collaborative efforts will make your data issues log items disappear faster and overall data quality will improve. With all the data stewards at the table willing to make changes to improve things for the benefit of all functions, the data owners are less likely to be protectionists of their functional priorities. CxOs can now support strategic projects rather than refereeing disagreements over conflicting functional point solutions. And this approach requires less active hand holding by the central data governance person, and more devolved cross functional activity.

Data stewards or data owners only reach back into the central data governance function for guidance or support escalating through the agreed mechanisms. In all the law firms we have worked with, data steward mindset change has been achieved using a guided framework of conversations that become incrementally more challenging and collaborative over several months.

Data councils, whether tactical, operational or both, should include data producers who input or import data and data consumers who use the data for analysis and reporting. There can sometimes be a disconnect between these two groups, which causes the producers to collect insufficient or too low-quality data for the needs of the information consumers or for each group to have a different understanding of what is going into or coming out of a particular field in a database.

The disconnect between producers and consumers is sometimes called the ‘Silk Road’ problem: Long ago, the Chinese produced silk, but didn’t know who bought it or their requirements. The Europeans bought it but didn’t know where it came from or how to request changes in the silks colour or weave. The Persians, who moved the silk from China to Europe, were aware of both sides of the transaction. The problem was that the Chinese didn’t know how the silk was being used, so they couldn’t produce it in the way the customer wanted. The Europeans had the opposite problem. They knew what they wanted but didn’t know how or who to ask for it. By connecting the producers needs with the consumer’s needs, the Persians ensured that the Chinese could sell more silk. The Europeans could buy more silk, and the Persians could make more money transporting more products.

The data council is YOUR Persia. It enables the needs and concerns of both groups to be heard and addressed. It also allows the members to share their knowledge to develop best practices and collaborate on the way forward.

When I get a group of data owners together and start talking to them about data governance frameworks, they often ask “OK, but how do we decide?”. There’s only one correct answer to this question. You all decide together.

The purpose of each group within the framework is to provide a discussion forum for consensus-based decision making. If an agreement cannot be reached, the decision making is passed to the next group in the framework. It is doubtful that the ultimate group, the steering board, will be unable to decide collectively.

It can be an unusual process to go through. Still, consensus-based decision making with the right stakeholders forming the discussion group is the most effective way to take the right decision, which can be quickly and easily adopted or implemented. Your role as data governance lead should be to guide and facilitate these groups to have the critical conversations you’ve identified.

The topics under discussion will all help iteratively increase awareness and understanding of the firm’s data challenges, ultimately leading to rapid decision making, problem solving and change implementation.

As long as you have clearly set out the accountabilities and responsibilities for each role and given people a chance to build trust in each other and the process consensus decision making is more achievable than most people think.

Focus on building your Persia and your firm’s overall data quality will improve.

Thank you for joining me for this law firm Data Governance Podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed it.

Please share like and review this episode so that more law firm leaders can learn about data governance.

Join me next time for Season Three, Episode Eight: “Solving data issues”, and make sure you never miss an episode by following me on LinkedIn if you’ve not already done so.

Please get in touch. If you’ve got questions or topic ideas for future episodes.