Guerrilla tactics lead to....change!

Guerrilla tactics lead to... change.

So there I was, a Data Quality manager in IT without a business sponsor. My team and I were applying Guerrilla communivative tactics to raise awareness and get stakeholder engagement when all of the sudden...WHAM!! The ship came in, the planets aligned, the hard work turns to luck, we beat The Kobayashi Maru!!

For those of you unfamiliar with Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru describes a training exercise for Star Trek cadets and it was designed to be a no-win scenario. And let’s face it, if you are running a DQ program and you’re sitting in IT you can only get so far before you absolutely must have a business sponsor.

Our Data Quality team started out 3 years ago and made a lot of good progress. We have an executive (I.T. mind you) approved mandate, we have resources and a budget, we maintain a wiki of over 1000 corporate terms and the related metadata, and we have a small group of business clients who we support and (of course) love dearly. But NOW…now we have a business sponsored Master Data Management (MDM) initiative underway and guess who gets to be the Business Lead for MDM and be ‘The One’ responsible for establishing (and getting business buy-in for) the Data Governance! That’s right, you heard me, I said BUSINESS Lead! I am now officially in ‘the business’ and am reporting directly to ‘the sponsor’! It almost makes me verklempt!

So how did it happen to me? I suppose if you were to watch the movie you would say it was a logical progression. I prefer to think it was the communivative, guerrilla, in your face stalking…nothing says ‘I care’ like persistent determination. So forgive me if I’ve been absent too long, the last few weeks have been interesting to say the least. I am very lucky to be part of this sure to be exciting ride, and I promise there will be more interesting stories ahead.