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How to Ramp Up Data Roles and Processes


Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

Pariveda Solutions' Ryan Gross discussed how to build an agile data management team and apply data governance at Data Summit Fall Connect 2020.

According to Gross, it is critical to focus on value: Identify, assess, and prioritize the use cases that you're going to use to roll out your new way of working. "Then, your data management team focuses on enabling those use cases. They focus on the ingestion side of things: What are the data sources? What data quality problems exist in them right now? How can you combine them together? People who really know the data, working with the analysts who are trying to derive value from it, focused on enabling."

Next, as you build out the experiments and get that prototype developed, you have the time to build up the capabilities so that you can apply the governance that confirms that you did control for those data quality issues that were the most important for this particular use case, explained Gross.

"And you can be certain that you did ensure that access is managed along the way to each one of those data products, intermediate and end state, such that the governance approach is not a manual counsel review; it's of the code itself and all of the details," said Gross. "It's really looking at the outputs of the reports that were run in your development environment to understand that, yes, this is correct."

At this point, you can deploy it out and start to capture the metrics around the tests, running against the data, ensure that those constraints are enforced. You can also spin up the data curator role as it applies to data that ends up in quarantine situations—where there's clear indication that the value you're deriving from the use case justifies the need to clean up any data that flows through and ends up in quarantine.

"And over time, you report back on the value of what's really being achieved, and the fact that you will have been building in avoidance of some of your downstream risks," said Gross. This allows you to report on the fact that you are being continuously compliant through all of these processes, avoiding risks of, you know, the multimillion dollar payouts that come with GDPR violations.

Videos of full presentations from Data Summit Connect Fall 2020, a 3-day series of data management and analytics webinars presented by DBTA and Big Data Quarterly, are also now available for on-demand viewing on the DBTA YouTube channel.


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