Driving Data Governance
Background
We are supporting the largest UK farmer-owned dairy cooperative, with operations throughout the UK and Ireland, employing over 1200 people at 8 locations. They manufacture an expansive range of award-winning products for the retail, food service and food ingredient markets, distributing to over 40 export markets across the globe.
Seeking to innovate and improve a number of their operational processes, the client sought a technology provider to address the data quality issues they were encountering, including:
- establishing a data quality baseline score for priority data sets;
- quantifying both the financial and non-financial benefits of addressing gaps in data quality;
- implement a data ownership and governance model to drive accountability;
- identify responsibilities for data quality within the organisation;
- implement a data quality KPI dashboard to track progress and improvements over the longer term.
The solution
We held several workshops with key stakeholders, whilst also analysing the organisation’s databases to identify specific data quality issues.
From this initial analysis, we identified several key issues that were preventing the organisation from maximising value from their data. We found that portions of the organisation’s data
were held offline, leading to inaccurate reporting. In addition, we found that manual data entry often resulted in incorrect, missing, and misconfigured values, while overly permissive user
permissions resulted in data being deleted. Combined, these factors lead to a general lack of trust in the data and its ability to accurately inform critical business decisions.
The impact
Following this analysis, we produced a report that provided the client with insights into the current status of their data quality and made recommendations around a data governance model that the organisation could adopt. To enable the client to monitor data quality and governance on an ongoing basis, we also created a dashboard that provides real-time insight into specific data quality and governance issues.
As a result of this partnership, the client has been able to create a clear roadmap for addressing its data quality and governance issues and has been able to clearly establish ownership for data management, ensuring that data quality and governance are maintained on an ongoing basis.
