In my initial blog on December 11, I kicked off dataTrending with a discussion on building an enterprise information management (EIM) program from scratch, as well as what the role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) should be. The two big challenges we faced at the State of Colorado with regards to EIM were, first, the operational authority and scope of the CDO and program. This blog picks up where the first blog left off, and deals with the second challenge, how to build value quickly in an organization with no history or reference point for this type of work.
The State literally had no history of enterprise architecture or data management principles and policies beyond individual agencies. Creating value quickly to both build momentum and to increase support among the skeptics would be critical. There was an abundance of opportunities and work to be done. How should we start and how do we prioritize opportunities? How do we organize the work and develop a framework that is repeatable and sustainable across a $19B organization? How do we manage work across multiple swim lanes – governance, policy and process, change management, technology and tools – at once? How does one mobilize an organization to start thinking and acting differently about its data? The cultural and trust issues can be real impediments to success and need to be addressed both head on and with diplomacy.
The most critical factor was to align and prioritize this work with the strategic needs, opportunities, and key business drivers of the State. What was important from the executive management’s (the Governor, Legislature, and Agency Directors) perspective? What were their top problems and issues they were trying to solve that could be supported by our program? This is the only way, in my opinion, an EIM program can truly add value and keep support.
The three prisms through which we approached our work was legislative, governance, and operations.
Through a series of four laws over two years, we established the state’s intent around data sharing and information management; explicitly gave agencies permission to share data (unless a federal or other state law expressly prohibited sharing of certain data); and, established a governance board that would retain continuity through administration changes.
On the governance side, we purposefully asked for a mix of business, technology, and financial representatives from the agency participants to ensure that business was driving priorities. Meetings were held monthly, and a very actionable set of deliverables was developed and worked through so progress could be quickly seen.
Operationally, we adopted enterprise architecture and data management frameworks to ensure our approach had a roadmap and followed industry best practices. We created an enterprise data strategy and work priorities were developed through input from key stakeholders across the organization and the governance board.
One of our primary business drivers was enterprise information sharing to inform policy making, resource decisioning, and program management. We identified three primary communities of interest with major information sharing initiatives across the state agencies and leveraged those projects to begin building out our portfolio of policies, processes, procedures, technologies, and tools that we would need to support enterprise initiatives. Into the project budgets we added line items for key tasks, activities, or people to support the work. Things like an enterprise architecture tool, business analysts, and data systems inventorying.
Instead of trying to tackle the entire data management framework, we identified four major areas that would support the information sharing business driver to begin our policy and standards work. And then finally, we just dove in and started the hard work. It was a major effort of entrepreneurship in a government environment. It was not always easy, and not everything we did was a huge success. But we had executive support and were iteratively able to make progress and show small wins built into bigger successes.
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