Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash

I want to start by telling you a bit about me, my name is Andy Lunt and I’m a Data Governance Manager at The Adecco Group. I’ve worked for The Adecco Group for the last 13 years starting out as a recruitment consultant, moving on into setting up and managing an Management Informationteam both here in the UK and Poland. I’ve now taken on the role of leading the implementation of a data governance programme.

I have lots of hobbies outside of work that keep me busy that in climbing to shooting clay pigeon as well DIY – I live in an old cottage so always lots of things to fix! I love to have a tiple at the weekends my poison of choice being Belgian beer!

The Path

There are many different ways for an organisation to start a data governance programme. Some are traditional and conventional, others less so. What’s more important is that in any organisation that depends on data, data governance happens rather than who starts it or how it’s started.

Increasingly, businesses are using buzz words like ‘data driven’ or ‘predictive analytics’ and so on. Part of the job of a new data governance manager is to help the organisation realise these aspirations by helping them understand the ‘as is’ data landscape and what foundations need to be put in place to enable analytics, data science and data engineering teams to get to their promised land.

At Adecco in the UK I have started our data governance journey 12 months ago, the driving force behind the move is the need for data to play a central role in helping us achieve our strategic goals.One of our big investments in this area was a data science function. We want this function to deliver insight into how our business operates but more importantly show us how to react to the changes in the world of recruitment around us.

The Challenge

The challenge, as any large organisation can sympathise with, is a large volume of data spread out in a federated fashion, which essentially means siloed data! Housed in a mixture of legacy and new systems. If we couple this challenge with limited system and data documentation and no real data ownership, we have recipe for failure when it comes to being a data driven organisation.

How I answered the Challenge!

• Data Ownership through the appointment of Data Stewards and Data Owners – to tackle the issue of ‘no responsibility’ for poor data and to make sure we have subject matter experts in the right areas to maintain the standard we set
• Data governance policy – to tackle the understanding of what is expected of everyone in our organisation and to formalise the need for our employees to reach a certain standard with data that we set.
• Implementation of a data cataloguing and governance tool – to help us to control and track our data standards in one place by connecting to our critical business systems. It is also allowing data discovery to all our data stakeholders, highlighting where data improvement is necessary in great detail
• Built a data dictionary and business glossary of terms - to improve our understanding of the meaning of the data captured in our systems. This central documentation is critical to our business speaking the same language and understanding the impact of change.
• Proof of Concepts pilots in the areas of Human Resources and Finance to prove the concept of data governance
• Raising awareness of data best practices – we have built data governance into business process by having consideration for data management practices in our project charts and system development teams dev standards

All these steps Adecco are taking are a collective effort to help us mature our data management practices and achieve our ultimate goal of becoming a data driven organisation in a safe and controlled way.

Want to hear more? DAMA UK members can access my webinar by logging into the website. You’ll find my webinar in the resources area. Enjoy