You have kicked off a data quality initiative and had some great results. Your next goal is to build on this success and grow the influence of your team around the organisation.
To achieve this, you need to get creative and put on your marketing hat. Here are some ideas that past interviewees on Data Quality Pro have shared with me when quizzed about their communication strategy.
1) Host an annual data quality event or summit
One of my recent interviews was with a data architect in a large lifestyle media organisation. To help engage the business, they are creating a data summit to help the business learn more about the potential of its data and how they can get involved.
This is an excellent idea for any company that wants to showcase some of the data quality projects they’ve been successfully delivering.
For global organisations it also offers the opportunity to host virtual events or invite members from overseas to observe how the data quality vision is maturing.
2) Appoint a data quality "communications officer"
In a previous role as a data quality analyst, I was given the task of spreading the word about data quality. At first I was hesitant, but my ISO9001 involvement meant that I got to speak with many other quality professionals around the organisation. Over time I was able to promote the progress we had achieved.
You don’t need a new resource for this role, but giving someone the responsibility for communicating the vision for data quality can be a real motivator and a way for someone in your team take greater pride in their achievements. It seems to be a common theme with our past guests; they all had "communications officer"-style activities in their team.
3) Create interactive data quality case studies
One project leader came up with a great idea of bringing their data quality story to life through case studies. These were hosted online and featured a variety of media formats both as a standard web page and also a PDF file.
Each PDF featured interviews with business users, technical teams, charts of cost and performance impact before improvement -- and what life was like after improvement. This is a real journey put down in words, video, audio and imagery.
You might be used to seeing technology vendors create useful case studies, so why not develop your own?
Hopefully these give you some ideas. What else would you add to the list? How have you communicated the success of your data quality initiatives in the past?
