BusinessForward

By Heather Broman, Solutions Analyst, BusinessForward

Master data management will ensure data integrity. It can in fact, make you a hero.

That is of course, if you know who the villains are. Too often the evils of inefficiency and single gatekeepers control spreadsheets with more sequels than a Marvel movie, fight against you. This can potentially knock out management of data that relates to your business process.

Positioning your team with the right tools will avoid and epic data battles.

In my prior blog, we covered the first step in managing your data through Process-Based Design. With documentation of processes and systems, you know when data is created and maintained at each step. It’s time to consider how efficient your methods for handling that data and how they can be improved.

There are a number of options available to store and manage information. At its core, the best method of storage is based on three things:

1. How you operate as a team.
2. The security considerations involved with those operations.
3. The technical knowledge of your team members.

Having just completed an IT Upgrade Project for a financial services company, I’ll use an example of how we were able to move an enormous amount of data from a spreadsheet into a centralized location. The data can now be updated in real-time and has a workflow assigned to it.

The Foes and Cons

Our customer was typical for a sizeable company, in that there were a considerable number of daily requests coming in to the IT organization to make updates to applications and troubleshoot issues. The process for most of these updates required multiple steps among various team members, including external parties. Tracking these requests was getting out of hand because of the number of people (more than 30) and the number of tickets around issues that needed to be resolved.

There were weekly progress meetings with those three dozen-plus people to gain the status on what applications were updated, which ones were to be updated, and any outstanding tickets. All of this information was stored in a spreadsheet controlled by one project manager who was the sole updater. Never a good idea to have one person as the guardian of the data galaxy.

In addition to this inefficiency, the document used to track this information was not easily accessible to those who needed to provide updates at the meetings. There was not an automatic versioning and tracking of changes that were made. This resulted in multiple spreadsheets being created from the primary version used, as the teams involved tracked their own statuses.

Within a couple of months there were close to eight versions of the spreadsheet floating around outside of the primary spreadsheet and it led to great confusion. Let’s just say among other things, the IT organization was struggling with its SLAs more than necessary.

Saving the Day Four Ways

In addition to an IT process development and documentation solution, the team needed a user-friendly application to get a handle on their data. To the rescue came a SharePoint site. They already had it, but were not using it in any step of their process for optimal efficiency. Better utilization of the site provided an enormous improvement to their daily workflow in four simple ways.

1. We utilized SharePoint’s “list” functionality by creating a new list using the data in the spreadsheet. Permissions were set up so that only members of the teams involved in the process would be able to update certain sections.
2. We built in a workflow to notify specific people after the status changed on the application and troubleshooting requests so that they knew what was in the queue.
3. Versioning was turned on so that all changes to the request were able to be easily viewed by all team members. A specific view for outside users was set up as well.
4. The view for the team members was put in to a spreadsheet format so they would be able to update it just as they would update the Excel Spreadsheet used before.

Within a couple of months, the site become the central source for all request information and data was able to be pulled out around the SLA’s for completion and to identify what required action based on the last modified date and the status.

Today the IT organization enjoys a far more cohesive team with the ability to manage the security of their data using skills that fit their needs.

From these small steps you can get what you need and put it on a platform that increases transparency, improves collaboration, and allows for connection to other services to easily pull data. This provides you with optimal efficiency in the shortest amount of time, without the hassle of having to set up a brand new enterprise-wide service.

Now that’s the way to deliver a Ka-Pow! to those nasty enemies of IT efficiency.

For information of how to be a superhero when it comes to managing your data through solutions like process documentation, contact mcomport@businessforward.com