Chief data officers zero in on governance challenges

Nascent form of data governance

Kelly, who had worked in IT in undergraduate admissions and in the university project management office, thought the new position sounded interesting and applied. When he was appointed to the position in January 2014, he had some concerns. “If you step into anything that is brand new without trepidation, I think you are a fool. It was a risk. I was in a permanent, securely funded role, and here I am jumping into something that is brand new and any day someone could have said, ‘We can’t really afford to have this visionary type position.’ It was a leap of faith.”

Kelly says that he spent the first four or five months reading everything he could get his hands on about the CDO role. “The more I read about it, the more I started to see stewardship as the nascent form of this thing that is catching fire called data governance.” He says once USC put the data governance label on what they were doing, it opened up a universe of concepts and ways to work with each other and subject matter they needed to be concerned with.

Kelly says that over the first year, the job description changed. “Initially we wrote it with a broad vocabulary to point in five or six directions of responsibility. In the past year, we fleshed out the job description and put in a more concrete vocabulary that reflects the framework of data governance we have agreed on, including data standards, data quality, integrity, and identity and access management. It is a discipline and area of concern we didn’t have a vocabulary for. We did it, of course, but we didn’t recognize it as a discipline.”

Finding early wins can be a key to success. “You have to look at how the organization is structured and identify which projects relate to critical operations where you can have quick return on investment,” Kelly says. “If you have some success, people will say, ‘Oh, so that is why we have this position.’”