You deserve effortless and accurate data reports

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Data Governance. As awareness grows, many of our clients are generally feeling like they need to work on their data governance, and some are asking us if we can help. In response, I’ve decided to write a blog series about this mysterious new-to-many and important subject. In this series, I’ll describe what Data Governance is (this post) and why it’s important, and provide you with a framework for understanding and improving Data Governance in your organization, regardless of where you are on the Data Governance spectrum.

Your reports are on the struggle bus. Your data is all over the place. Everyone is complaining that they can’t get the reports they need, or spend too much valuable time getting mediocre reports. You and your staff are spending way too much time battling data systems that should be making your life easier instead of harder. Are you fishing around for days just trying to get the right information? Answering 20 questions a day from people who can’t get the data they need? Spending hours (or days, or weeks) cleaning and merging the same data over and over in various spreadsheets?

Every professional field has its own language. When we started working with fundraising data, I had to figure out what caging was. (In case you aren’t a fundraiser, it doesn’t involve chickens.) I bet you didn’t know that a diplopodologist is someone who studies millipedes. And why would you? That’s not information you need to do your job. (Although we do love learning about other people’s jobs from Allie Ward at Ologies). When it comes to data - talking about data, thinking about data, working with data - no-data folks sometimes get intimidated. Yet, if you want to work with data engineers, data analysts, programmers, or other specialists from the data world, we need to find some shared language to get onto the same page when collaborating on projects.