Find the Most Effective Sponsor
An excerpt from Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up by Lauren Maffeo
We’ve all dealt with meeting fatigue where colleagues try to solve problems by filling our calendar with invitations to “hop on a quick call.” If meetings lack purpose, agendas, clear leaders, or follow-up actions, they could’ve been emails and saved endless hours. One less-discussed time suck? Not having the right people in the room to make key decisions.
You’ve done lots of work thus far to select the right data stewards for your data governance council. All of it will stall if you don’t have a senior member of your organization to sponsor this council and its data governance efforts. So, your first step is to confirm whom you’ll need sponsorship from.
Imagine you’re in a C-suite role yourself as the Chief Data Officer (CDO). You might report to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) or the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Your role involves writing the strategy to collect, store, and manage your organization’s data. All of this work is data governance, and since you’re part of the executive team, you might be the perfect person to lead the data governance council by serving the board chair stewardship role that we’ll discuss later.
If you’re in a C-suite role yourself, do you need more executive buy-in? The answer depends on your unique business, the company culture, and your own relationship with the rest of the executives. If you report to the CIO, your boss owns the infrastructure for your organization. Their tasks include signing off on procurement for new tech, implementing new IT across the organization, and ensuring that all IT decisions support the business strategy.
Now, consider the work your data governance council will do. You’ll start by selecting a specific, data-focused project to shepherd through production. To achieve this goal, your data stewards will need to choose the right tech stack, build processes to confirm data quality, ensure that all data meets security standards, and document a strategy to prevent data drift post-production, amongst other tasks.
Since this work falls under the CIO’s domain, your data governance council will need the CIO’s buy-in. But you’ve glimpsed your boss’s calendar and know how slammed they are. Adding council chairperson duties to their list won’t likely go well. In this case, asking them to serve as your council’s sponsor is a great option.
Sponsors are discussed less often than mentors, but their role is more essential. Sponsors advocate for your work by ensuring that it gets the resources and visibility to thrive. This saves huge amounts of time in the long run. Rather than spending months searching for buy-in only to realize you’ve recruited the wrong people, you’ll confirm that your data governance council’s work has support from someone with the power and connections to advocate for that work, even when your councilmembers are not in the room.
Whoever your council sponsor is, you will need to sell them on your data governance efforts. Remember the data mission statement that you wrote in Chapter 1? It’s going to come in handy here. Since you’ll be appealing to business leaders, you’ll need to show that your data governance efforts support their goals. All the work you did in Chapter 1, from writing your mission statement for data to assigning stewards per section of your framework, should reinforce a bigger business goal. Whatever that goal is, from decreasing overhead to boosting customer satisfaction, you’ll find the right sponsor for your data governance council if you show that your work will improve theirs.
If you’re not sure how to choose the right sponsor for your council, it helps to follow this guidance from Sylvia Ann Hewlett:
Would-be sponsors in large organizations are ideally two levels above you with line of sight to your role; in smaller firms, they’re either the founder or president or are part of his or her inner circle.
As you read this advice, consider your own organizational structure. Whether you’re in the C-suite or below, finding the right sponsor for your council will require you to manage up. The best way to do that is to find senior leaders in your organization who grasp how crucial data is for your business, are familiar with your work, and have strong relationships with colleagues across the business. Most crucially, they’re committed to giving your council the buy-in, resources, and sponsorship to succeed. Their help is essential to not letting your work languish.
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt. If you’d like to continue reading Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up by Lauren Maffeo, you can purchase the ebook and audio book directly from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.
