Partner for Success!

These are some thoughts we have bounced around regarding partnerships that must exist to engage a data steward or to establish data governance. There are more questions for thought than proscriptive answers:

1. It is essential to have a relationship with anyone who can have an effect on your data; how do you initiate productive dialog with the IT team to develop a partnership? how do you determine who the other stakeholders should be per transaction? business partner? vendor? customer? employees? consumer advocates?

2. Part of your data protection obligations are to assure 'adequate protection' of data. How do you explain that obligation to your IT partner in his (or her) language? How do you get the legal team to meet data protection language & priority? (They may get excited when they are asked to share *their* info. but less enthusiastic if they have to spend extra resources providing support for complicated data transactions...

3. The CIO never wants to return your calls because he views you as 'those necessary evil people who must be in legal or something'? How do you get the call back? Better still, how to you get the tech teams and the policy teams and other stakeholders to be proactive about governance? How do you get system users to care *before* they have to share data and *before* there is a breach of some kind?

4. How do you overcome your own feeling that the CIO has all that technical stuff covered & surely security and privacy are covered-- ie How do you show that what you provide as a privacy expert is valuable?

5. Once you have initiated the partnership with your stakeholders, how do these best practices help keep that partnership robust & effective in the business and for the system users/ consumers?

6. So you've won the hearts and minds of your IT team-- what team comes next? Should you approach that team alone or as a collective force?

A few thoughts for a Saturday night...

Posted at 07:11PM Dec 16, 2006 by Michelle Finneran Dennedy in General  |  Comments[1]