Even if you are convinced that your organization needs some capability or improvement in master data or data governance, it’s not always easy to motivate an organization to take on a large project that seems at least one layer disconnected from the business problems you need to solve. The language of data quality is very appealing to many in IT and data management roles, but it’s a foreign dialect to many business managers who wonder why they need yet another IT system.
One very simple way to cut through this skepticism is to bundle your proposal with some obvious benefit for the business. In an upstream oil and gas company, for example, if you can make the reservoir engineers and geologists more efficient and effective, you can substantially improve business performance. Perhaps you can incorporate a little data portal that allows those highly valuable employees a single place to access the production, completions and reserves data that may be sourced from many systems. This can be highly elaborate with a map-driven interface and links to file repositories and team collaboration capabilities as well as structured systems of record. Or it can be relatively modest, even as simple as a query builder that lets people choose selection criteria and data attributes to dump into a csv file.
What’s important is connecting the very real improvements in data infrastructure all the way through to the end consumers of the data so that they not only receive the benefits of better data, they perceive them as well. This “seeing is believing” approach will go a long way towards building an organization that values both high-quality data and the investments required to achieve that quality.