Data Management.

Assessment and Strategy

Your Situation and Challenges

Organizational appetite for data is increasing, with growing demands for data to better support business processes and inform decision-making.

For data to be accessible and trustworthy for the business it must be effectively managed throughout its lifecycle.

Despite the growing focus on data, many organizations struggle to develop an effective strategy for managing their data assets.

Successful management and consistent delivery of data assets throughout their lifecycle requires the collaboration of the business and IT and the balance of technology, process, and resourcing solutions.

Incremental Approach: Building a mature and optimized practice doesn’t occur overnight – it takes time and effort. Use this blueprint’s approach and roadmap results, to support your organization in building a practice that prioritizes scope, increases the effectiveness of your data management practice, and improves your alignment with business data needs.

Build Smart: Don’t do data management for data management’s sake, but instead align it to business requirements and the business’s vision for the organization’s data. Ensure initiatives and program investments best align to business priorities and support the organization in becoming more data driven and data centric.

Culture of Collaboration: For a data management practice to be successful and have longevity, it must actively engage the business during its planning and implementation. Through this cross-functional and collaborative approach, data assets can be best managed and leveraged by the business.

Situation

Challenges

Insight

Fit-for-purpose Data Management

To support the design of a fit-for-purpose data management practice that aligns with the business’s data requirements this assessment will guide you in:

  • Determining the target capabilities for the different dimensions of data management

  • Identifying the interaction dependencies and coordination efforts required to build a successful data management practice.

Two Options To Get Our Help In Structuring Your Data Management Practice

  • You are responsible to carry out your Data Management Assessment and Strategy. We provide the structure, framework, templates, and a set of calls to accompany and advise you.

    Each call will focus on explaining the material and helping you to plan your Data Management Assessment and Strategy, interpret and analyze the results of each step, and set the direction for your next activity.

  • Incept is responsible for the delivery of your Data Management Assessment and Strategy

    A consulting team will be assigned to your Data Management Strategy project. We will lead and deliver your project, involving your team at every step.

Deliverables

  • Alignment is critical with executives. We provide the material to explain why and how we will create the roadmap.

  • We also provide all the background material on what we will be doing, why, and what can be expected. Incept can’t do this alone, so we have to give your team the basics.

  • We will be speaking to people (the business) and this document provides all the questions required to obtain the information we need.

    Use this template to support you in understanding the current data consumption practices of the organization and uncovering stakeholder goals and vision around the availability, usage, and value of data to roles, responsibilities, and their plans for their departments.

  • The Data Management Assessment and Planning Tool will help you analyze your organization's data requirements, identify data and data management strategies, and systematically develop a plan for your target data management practice.

    We use the current state assessment results and the findings from your data strategy planning as a starting point for building a custom list of target capabilities. Additional capabilities of this tool will help us assess the gap between your current state and target state, and provide a visual view of the gap size and actions required while assisting in the creation of a roadmap.

  • This is a project, and we understand this. The project charter serves several important functions. It organizes the project so that you can make efficient and effective resource allocation decisions. It also communicates important details about the project purpose, scope definition, and the project parameters.

    This document will help your project manager integrate this initiative into your PMO.

  • This is either optional, or we can do this as a first step.

    This presentation template is 90% pre-filled to create a compelling message and case for the value of data management in your organization and what the business can expect.

    Based on your project’s parameters and oversight, you can either use it as an internal document to centralize your work or adapt it into a presentation document for educating project stakeholders on progress and findings.

  • The Data Management Strategy Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) template is designed to help an organization plan and execute a project evaluating the business's data requirements for selecting subject areas and designing a data management program that addresses the business's current and evolving needs.

  • We use this tool to identify key stakeholders for your project, analyze the impact of the project on the stakeholders, and plan a communication strategy.

  • When creating initiatives, we consider all of their components, from their objective to their benefits and costs. Use this template to map out the goals, objectives, benefits, staffing, risks, and business value of each initiative.

    This template allows us to document in more detail the various initiatives that will go into the roadmap.

  • Proper benefits tracking and monitoring play a critical role in ensuring that expected benefits are realized as your Data Management Roadmap is implemented.

    It may take several months before benefit targets can be met. Measure benefit metrics at regular intervals in order to accurately monitor benefit realization progress. If there is a significant gap between a goal measure and an actual measurement, it may be necessary to create a remedial action plan to ensure that the benefit is captured.

    This template captures the information by stakeholder.

Contact us.

Avoid the pitfalls of a Data Governance initiative that is not aligned with business value, not in harmony with your culture and technology, or that doesn’t leverage the learning from the many client experiences we benefit from. Team Incept’s experience will help you review and modernize Data Governance so that you can trust that data is consistent and trustworthy and doesn't get misused.