Solving Data Issues using Data Governance

Season 3 Episode 8

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.

In this episode, I’m going to talk about solving data issues. Where these issues come from, why they are important, the skills and mechanisms that help you solve data problems, and the additional benefits solving data issues bring to your data governance framework.

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Episode Transcript

In this episode, I’m going to talk about solving data issues. Where these issues come from, Why they are important, the skills and mechanisms that help you solve data problems and the additional benefits solving data issues bring to your data governance framework.

Let’s start by thinking about why data issues are such a big activity for data governance leads. Most law firms who want to implement data governance are doing so in response to an urgent set of data challenges. These challenges usually come from other significant initiatives like creating a business intelligence capability or replacing one or more of the firm’s core systems.

That’s why creating a data issues log and engaging your stewards and prioritising and solving these issues is a core part of the Iron Carrot Data Governance Roadmap.

So, what are data issues? These are anything and everything that is causing pain or creating a blockage to the effective use of data and information by your firm. Data issues will usually be one of four things:

• A People problem – Meaning that someone either doesn’t know how to capture or find or use a piece of data.
• A Process problem – There is some inefficiency making it harder to manage and use a piece of data.
• A Technology problem – Usually a capability, capacity, or a connectivity gap or
• A Data problem – Which goes to data quality and includes things like it’s not being captured properly or we’re not capturing it at all, but we really need it.

For full transparency and collaboration, you’ll need to be capturing and prioritising data issues in a centralised place. This is your data issues log. If you want to know more about the different fields and activities around the data issues log, then you can listen to Season One, Episode Six.

These data issues will be coming at you from several directions. As part of setting up your data governance framework, you’ll have captured the big-ticket items and the operational bugbears, which are priorities for your data stakeholders, owners, and stewards.

You also have a bunch of data issues that have been added to the technical debt register and so have never been addressed, and that’s because the problems belong to the business owners of the data, not to the technology teams that own the technical debt list. Plus, as your data stewards get more comfortable operating within the framework, all of the new stuff will come to light and get added to that issues log each month.

Examples of data issues include fields were not included in a data capture form because the function that owned the software didn’t need them, meaning that downstream systems had to capture the information by asking lawyers directly, or policies cap data migrations at three years of data when downstream reporting systems needed seven years to meet client and partner requests.

Another example is a lack of data quality rules. So much of the captured data was useless and needed hours of manual effort to fix anyway. Or disconnected key systems so that people are re-entering data downloads manually into other systems.

As a data governance lead, you’ll need to have or have available to you some key skills to help support your data governance framework groups, and particularly your data stewards in solving these data issues.

Project management to coordinate the people and other resources needed to explore, solve, and resolve the data issue effectively, and to make sure that all the conversations and decisions are being shared transparently with the data governance framework and other stakeholders. After all, most law firms have a small pool of technical experts who will need to resolve nearly all of the issues on that data issues log.

Business analysts, to help identify business needs and determine solutions to business problems. From a data governance perspective, this helps you focus solutions on process improvements, organisational changes, documentation gaps or strategic planning. This role or skill set is helpful in creating cross functional data lineage and business process diagrams, and also in identifying improvement areas that weren’t in the scope of the original issue but can significantly move your data governance and data capabilities forward.

Data analysis means collecting, organising, and studying data to provide business insight. For issues that aren’t about people, processes, or technologies, this analysis will either highlight that there is an issue or help find where and how the issue could be solved.

Since most firms want to implement data governance in response to a strategic priority or an urgent set of data challenges, you shouldn’t be surprised when the issues log and its progress becomes a key measure of success for your data governance framework.

As a data governance lead, your data governance framework groups should provide a discussion forum for data questions to be explored and resolved quickly and effectively, without creating an additional overhead within projects and day jobs.

You shouldn’t be surprised that data stewards find it easier to list problems than pose solutions, so a significant part of your role as a data governance lead will be in capturing the issues that come up as your framework matures. You can use meetings of your data stewards group to agree on how to log issues and what criteria to use to prioritise them, and as your data governance framework gets going, you can make issue prioritisation a shared exercise to get the buy in and support of all the necessary stakeholders and data stewards.

It is your job to help guide them in prioritising the issues which will have the highest impact on the firm this collaborative approach also helps build trust and sets the example of collective problem solving for your data stewards group.

You will also need to regularly remind stewards that they need to participate in brainstorming potential solutions to the problems they share. The path to a solution can include the creation of subgroups of key SMEs to dive deeper into the problem with the support of business and data analysts.

In addition, by using a collaboration area as a central issues log to help data stewards keep a record of progress, senior stakeholders can see a clear correlation between the data governance framework, the firm strategic objectives and solving data challenges.

Your role as data governance lead is to make sure you have the right people accountable for the firm’s critical data. You need to be clear about how you will use them and the framework groups to help address the urgent challenges that form your data governance business case and the new issues that get raised on an ongoing basis.

Working out loud by involving all of the data stewards in prioritising and solving issues, helps build a culture of trust and collaboration that in turn makes solving issues easier and faster.

These groups might need the support or involvement of data analysts, business analysts, or project analysts to explore problems and implement solutions, and these skills can come from dedicated resources, be borrowed from other teams, or be skills that you have as the firms data governance lead.

By using a collaboration space backed up by regular communications, senior stakeholders can see a clear correlation between the data governance roles and the firm’s strategy. An action plan for resolving issues gives them comfort that data governance is an enabler, not a blocker.

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 Nine: “Starting a Business Glossary”.

Make sure you never miss an episode by following me on LinkedIn if you’ve not already done so, and please get in touch if you’ve got questions or topic ideas for future episodes.