Mentioned in a Wired article

Last bit of self-promotion today. About a month ago, my dissertation was referenced by Dan Ariely in a Wired article. I went to grad school with Dan. For me, the best thing about the mention was that I am now officially an analytics expert.

New Capture Your Flag Videos

Also have new capture your flag interviews. The first two are from last year. The new stuff is below.

Data Governance

I have not written anything in a while. More a problem of inspiration than anything else. I just didn’t have too much new to say. I now find myself inspired to discuss data governance. How exciting!

My company, Turner, is undergoing some profound changes in how we distribute our content. These changes are requiring us to retrofit existing measurement (that is, data collection) systems and standup new systems. And the process is a bit painful. We are doing a good job making the changes and developing the systems, but despite our best (admittedly organic) efforts we are still wrestling with issues of who makes critical design decisions, how to handle new requests, and who gets informed when changes get made. Though the analytic part of my job is really around building and using the analytic platforms, I was finding myself facilitating discussions around data collection and measurement.

My boss noticed this and decided to make my responsibilities more formal. So, she asked me lead our efforts in data governance and, despite my two degrees in political science, I had no idea what she was talking about. As we were having this discussion, I was thinking, “Do I need to set up a bi-cameral legislature? How about an independent judiciary?”

So what is it? If you do a Google search, you can find long and precise definitions of “Data Governance” but I find those definitions overly complicated. The short version on data governance is: determining, in advance, who gets involved (and defining their role) when there is a change in the data collection and measurement requirements of the company.” At its core, data governance is about communication. Everything else is just tactics. I am admittedly am focused on web marketing and analytics. So, my apologies to folks working other industries if my experiences don’t translate.

In terms of tactics (think policies and procedures), there are a few management techniques that we are using to make sure we include the right folks when data collection and measurement requirements change. First thing we are doing is getting Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) in place that make expectations between internal groups very clear. Our SLA’s specify, in painful detail, for any given situation that we could think of, what our time table is to handle the situation (fix it, meet about it, diagnose it, whatever), who gets contacted, and what the responsibilities of each group is in managing the situation. I treat these things as contracts and we negotiate the “terms” with our internal partners. Also, there are penalties (typically escalating to someone’s boss) for not living up to your part of the contract. I think of the SLA’s as our legal cannon and specify the policies that we are all going to agree to adhere to and what happens when there is an exception.

Another tactic that we are embracing is process documentation. We are trying to get more formal about our internal processes. This is different than the SLA in that they may not be discussed with anyone from any other internal group. We may get their input and have them be part of the process. We may not. Depends on the process. We are using a six-sigma person to do the process mapping, create RACI documents, etc.

On staffing. We are in the process of hiring a ”Data Steward.” Seriously. It is a real job. Don’t take my word for it. Look it up. This is the person who documents stuff and works with our internal partners to get the SLA’s in place, run the meetings. Etc. We are finding that for a company of our size, we need a person handling data quality and collection full time. The data steward will also act as a communications hub and make sure that the appropriate parties are speaking with each other. Note that this role is not a data cop. It is an influence and education type role, not so much a compliance role.

For those few people who have been reading the blog for a while, you know I am a big fan of ensuring that the analytic folks have high quality data to work with. To that end, you can do a bunch of automated data QA to ensure that your data is meeting your quality expectations. One new thing I have learned; you should also check to see that the relationship between variables is possible. For example, you can’t have fewer pages views than unique users. If your data says otherwise, there is a problem. Data quality assurance is going to be a big part of our data governance. In effect, we are looking to ensure that our collection activities are following the “law”

We are doing some other things, but the last thing I want to discuss is conducting prioritization meetings. We have found that if we don’t have dedicated meetings that show all outstanding requests (changes and bug fixes, mostly) it is very difficult to provide visibility to our internal clients what we are doing. They are a very reasonable bunch, but they, understandably, get nervous when they don’t know what we are working on. Or not working on. You can prioritize on a number of issues, but basically it comes down to business impact, effort, and likelihood of success.