Effective IT Communications

Empower IT employees to communicate well with any stakeholder across the organization.

Analyst perspective

There has never been an expectation for IT to communicate well.

Brittany Lutes
Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group

Diana MacPherson
Senior Research Analyst
Info-Tech Research Group

IT rarely engages in proper communications. We speak at, inform, or tell our audience what we believe to be important. But true communications seldom take place.

Communications only occur when channels are created to ensure the continuous opportunity to obtain two-way feedback. It is a skill that is developed over time, with no individual having an innate ability to be better at communications. Each person in IT needs to work toward developing their personal communications style. The problem is we rarely invest in development or training related to communications. Information and technology fields spend time and money developing hard skills within IT, not soft ones.

The benefits associated with communications are immense: higher business satisfaction, funding for IT initiatives, increased employee engagement, better IT to business alignment, and the general ability to form ongoing partnerships with stakeholders. So, for IT departments looking to obtain these benefits through true communications, develop the necessary skills.

Executive summary

Info-Tech Insight
No one is born a good communicator. Every IT employee needs to spend the time and effort to grow their communication skills as constant change and worsening IT crises mean that IT cannot afford to communicate poorly anymore.

Your challenge

Overall satisfaction with IT is correlated to satisfaction with IT communications

The bottom line? For every 10% increase in communications there 8.6% increase in overall IT satisfaction. Therefore, when IT communicates with the organization, stakeholders are more likely to be satisfied with IT overall.

Info-Tech Diagnostic Programs, N=330 organizations

IT struggles to communicate effectively with the organization:

• CIOs are given minimal time to present to the board or executive leaders about IT’s value and alignment to business goals.
• IT initiatives are considered complicated and confusing.
• The frequency and impact of IT crises are under planned for, making communications more difficult during a major incident.
• IT managers do not have the skills to communicate effectively with their team.
• IT employees do not have the skills to communicate effectively with one another and end users.

Common obstacles

IT is prevented from communicating effectively due to these barriers:

• Difficulty assessing the needs of the audience to inform the language and means of communication that should be used.
• Using technical jargon rather than translating the communication into commonly understood terms.
• Not receiving the training required to develop communication skills across IT employees.
• Frequently speak at organization stakeholders rather than engaging through dialogue.
• Beginning many communications from a blank page, especially crisis communications.
• Difficulty presenting complex concepts in a short time to an audience in a digestible and concise manner without diluting the point.

Effective IT communications are rare:

53% of CXOs believe poor communication between business and IT is a barrier to innovation.
Source: Info-Tech CEO-CIO Alignment Survey, 2022

“69% of those in management positions don’t feel comfortable even communicating with their staff.”
Source: TeamStage, 2022

Info-Tech’s approach

Effective communications is not a broadcast but a dialogue between communicator and audience in a continuous feedback loop.

The Info-Tech difference:

1. Always treat every communication as a dialogue, enabling the receiver of the message to raise questions, concerns, or ideas.
2. Different audiences will require different communications. Be sure to cater the communication to the needs of the receiver(s).
3. Never assume the communication was effective. Create measures and adjust the communications to get the desired outcome.

Common IT communications

And the less common but still important communications

Communicating Up to Board or Executives

• Board Presentations
• Executive Leadership Committee Meetings
• Technology Updates
• Budget Updates
• Risk Updates
• Year in Review

Communicating Across the Organization

• Townhalls – external to IT
• Year in Review
• Crisis Email
• Intranet Communication
• Customer/Constituent Requests for Information
• Product Launches
• Email
• Watercooler Chat

Communicating Within IT

• Townhalls – internal to IT
• Employee 1:1s
• Team Meetings
• Project Updates
• Project Collaboration Sessions
• Year in Review
• All-Hands Meeting
• Employee Interview
• Onboarding Documentation
• Vendor Negotiation Meetings
• Vendor Product Meetings
• Email
• Watercooler Chat

Insight Summary

Overarching insight
IT cannot afford to communicate poorly given the overwhelming impact and frequency of change related to technology. Learn to communicate well or get out of the way of someone who can.

Communication principles

Follow these principles to support all IT communications.

Two-Way

Incorporate feedback loops into your communication efforts. Providing stakeholders with the opportunity to voice their opinions and ideas will help gain their commitment and buy-in.

Timely

Frequent communications mitigate rumors and the spread of misinformation. Provide warning before the implementation of any changes whenever possible. Communicate as soon as possible after decisions have been made.

Consistent

Make sure the messaging is consistent across departments, mediums, and presenters. Provide managers with key phrases to support the consistency of messages.

Open & Honest

Transparency is a critical component of communication. Always tell employees that you will share information as soon as you can. This may not be as soon as you receive the information but as soon as sharing it is acceptable.

Authentic

Write messages in a way that embodies the personality of the organization. Don’t spin information; position it within the wider organizational context.

Targeted

Use your target audience profiles to determine which audiences need to consume which messages and what mediums should be employed.

Importance of IT being a good communicator

Don’t pay the price for poor communication.

IT needs to communicate well because:

• IT risk mitigation and technology initiative funding are dependent on critical stakeholders comprehending the risk impact and initiative benefit in easy-to-understand terms.
• IT employees need clear and direct information to feel empowered and accountable to do their jobs well.
• End users who have a good experience engaging in communications with IT employees have an overall increase in satisfaction with IT.
• Continuously demonstrating IT’s value to the organization comes when those initiatives are clearly aligned to overall objectives.
• Communication prevents assumptions and further miscommunication from happening among IT employees who are usually impacted and fear change the most.

“Poor communication results in employee misunderstanding and errors that cost approximately $37 billion.”
– Intranet Connections, 2019

Effective communication enables organizational strategy and facilitates a two-way exchange

What makes internal communications effective?

To be effective, internal communications must be strategic. They should directly support organizational objectives, reinforce key messages to make sure they drive action, and facilitate two-way dialogue, not just one-way messaging.

Measure the value of the communication

Communication effectiveness can be measured through a variety of metrics:

• Increase in Productivity
“When employees are offered better communication technology and skills, productivity can increase by up to 30%” (Expert Market, 2022).

• Increase in Understanding Decision Rationale
Employees who report understanding the rationale behind the business decisions made by the executive leadership team (ELT) are 3.6x more likely to be engaged, compared to those who were not (McLean & Company Engagement Survey Database, 2022; N=133,167 responses, 187 organizations).

• Increase in Revenue
Collaboration amongst C-suite executives led to a 27% increase in revenue compared to low collaborating C-suites (IBM, 2021).

• Increase in End-User Satisfaction
80.9% of end users are satisfied with IT’s ability to communicate with them regarding the information they need to perform their job (Info-Tech’s End-User Satisfaction Survey Database, N=20,617 end users from 126 organizations).

Methods to determine effectiveness:

• CIO Business Vision Survey
• Engagement surveys
• Focus groups
• Suggestion boxes
• Team meetings
• Random sampling
• Informal feedback
• Direct feedback
• Audience body language
• Repeating the message back

How to navigate the research center

This research center is intended to ensure that IT never starts their communications from a blank page again:

“‘Effectiveness’ can mean different things, and effectiveness for your project is going to look different than it would for any other project.”
– Gale McCreary in WikiHow, 2022

Audience: Organizational leadership

Speaking with Board and executive leaders about strategy, risk, and value

Keep in mind:

“Today’s CIOs have a story to tell. They must change the old narrative and describe the art of the (newly) possible. A great leader rises to the occasion and shares a vision that inspires the entire organization.”
– Dan Roberts, CIO, 2019

Communications for board presentations

Secure funding and demonstrate IT as a value add to business objectives.

DEFINING INSIGHT

Stop presenting what is important to you as the CIO and present to the board what is important to them.

Why does IT need to communicate with the board?

• To get their buy-in and funding for critical IT initiatives.
• To ensure that IT risks are understood and receive the funding necessary to mitigate.
• To change the narrative of IT as a service provider to a business enabler.

FRAMEWORK

CHECKLIST

Do’s & Don’ts of Communicating Board Presentations:

Do: Ensure you know all the members of the board and their strengths/areas of focus.

Do: Ensure the IT objectives and initiatives align to the business objectives.

Do: Avoid using any technical jargon.

Do: Limit the amount of data you are using to present information. If it can’t stand alone, it isn’t a strong enough data point.

Do: Avoid providing IT service metrics or other operational statistics.

Do: Demonstrate how the organization’s revenue is impacted by IT activities.

Do: Tell a story that is compelling and excited.

OUTCOME

Organization Alignment

• Approved organization objectives and IT objectives are aligned and supporting one another.

Stakeholder Buy-In

• Board members all understand what the future state of IT will look like – and are excited for it!

Awareness on Technology Trends

• It is the responsibility of the CIO to ensure the board is aware of critical technology trends that can impact the future of the organization/industry.

Risks

• Risks are understood, the impact they could have on the organization is clear, and the necessary controls required to mitigate the risk are funded.

Communications for business updates

Continuously build strong relationships with all members of business leadership.

DEFINING INSIGHT

Business leaders care about themselves and their goals – present ideas and initiatives that lean into this self-interest.

Why does IT need to communicate business updates?

• The key element here is to highlight how IT is impacting the organization’s overall ability to meet goals and targets.
• Ensure all executive leaders know about and understand IT’s upcoming initiatives – and how they will be involved.

FRAMEWORK

CHECKLIST

Do’s & Don’ts of Communicating Business Updates:

Do: Ensure IT is given sufficient time to present with the rest of the business leaders.

Do: Ensure the goals of IT are clear and can be depicted visually.

Do: Tie every IT goal to the objectives of different business leaders.

Do: Avoid using any technical jargon.

Do: Reinforce the positive benefits business leaders can expect.

Do: Avoid providing IT service metrics or other operational statistics.

Do: Demonstrate how IT is driving the digital transformation of the organization.

OUTCOME

Better Reputation

• Get other business leaders to see IT as a value add to any initiative, making IT an enabler not an order taker.

Executive Buy-In

• Executives are concerned about their own budgets; they want to embrace all the innovation but within reason and minimal impact to their own finances.

Digital Transformation

• Indicate and commit to how IT can help the different leaders deliver on their digital transformation activities.

Relationship Building

• Establish trust with the different leaders so they want to engage with you on a regular basis.

Audience: Organization wide

Speaking with all members of the organization about the future of technology – and unexpected crises.

Less than 50% of internal communications lean on a proper framework to support their communication activities.
– Philip Nunn, iabc, 2020

Communications for strategic IT initiatives

Communicate IT’s strategic objectives with all business stakeholders and users.

DEFINING INSIGHT

IT leaders struggle to communicate how the IT strategy is aligned to the overall business objectives using a common language understood by all.

Why does IT need to communicate its strategic objectives?

• To ensure a clear and consistent view of IT strategic objectives can be understood by all stakeholders within the organization.
• To demonstrate that IT strategic objectives are aligned with the overall mission and vision of the organization.

FRAMEWORK

CHECKLIST

Do’s & Don’ts of Communicating IT Strategic Objectives:

Do: Ensure all IT leaders are aware of and understand the objectives in the IT strategy.

Do: Ensure there is a visual representation of IT’s goals.

Do: Ensure the IT objectives and initiatives align to the business objectives.

Do: Avoid using any technical jargon.

Do: Provide metrics if they are relevant, timely, and immediately understandable.

Do: Avoid providing IT service metrics or other operational statistics.

Do: Demonstrate how the future of the organization will benefit from IT initiatives.

OUTCOME

Organization Alignment

• All employees recognize the IT strategy as being aligned, even embedded, into the overall organization strategy.

Stakeholder Buy-In

• Business and IT stakeholders alike understand what the future state of IT will look like – and are excited for it!

Role Clarity

• Employees within IT are clear on how their day-to-day activities impact the overall objectives of the organization.

Demonstrate Growth

• Focus on where IT is going to be maturing in the coming one to two years and how this will benefit all employees.

Communications for crisis management

Minimize the fear and chaos with transparent communications.

DEFINING INSIGHT

A crisis communication should fit onto a sticky note. If it’s not clear, concise, and reassuring, it won’t be effectively understood by the audience.

Why does IT need to communicate when a crisis occurs?

• To ensure all members of the organization have an understanding of what the crisis is, how impactful that crisis is, and when they can expect more information.
• “Half of US companies don’t have a crisis communication plan” (CIO, 2017).

FRAMEWORK

CHECKLIST

Do’s & Don’ts of Communicating During a Crisis:

Do: Provide timely and regular updates about the crisis to all stakeholders.

Do: Involve the Board or ELT immediately for transparency.

Do: Avoid providing too much information in a crisis communication.

Do: Have crisis communication statements ready to be shared at any time for possible or common IT crises.

Do: Highlight that employee safety and wellbeing is top priority.

Do: Work with members of the public relations team to prepare any external communications that might be required.

OUTCOME

Ready to Act

• Holding statements for possible crises will eliminate the time and effort required when the crisis does occur.

Reduce Fears

• Prevent employees from spreading concerns and not feeling included in the crisis.

Maintain Trust

• Ensure Board and ELT members trust IT to respond in an appropriate manner to any crisis or major incident.

Eliminate Negative Reactions

• Any crisis communication should be clear and concise enough when done via email.

Audience: IT employees

IT employees need to receive and obtain regular transparent communications to better deliver on their expectations.

Keep in mind:

“IT professionals who […] enroll in communications training have a chance to both upgrade their professional capabilities and set themselves apart in a crowded field of technology specialists.”
– Mark Schlesinger, Forbes, 2021

Communications for IT activities and tactics

Get IT employees aligned and clear on their daily objectives.

DEFINING INSIGHT

Depending on IT goals, the structure might need to change to support better communication among IT employees.

Why does IT need to communicate IT activities?

• To ensure all members of the project team are aligned with their tasks and responsibilities related to the project.
• To be able to identify, track, and mitigate any problems that are preventing the successful delivery of the project.

FRAMEWORK

CHECKLIST

Do’s & Don’ts of Communicating IT Activities:

Do: Provide metrics that define how success of the project will be measured.

Do: Demonstrate how each project aligns to the overarching objectives of the organization.

Do: Avoid having large meetings that include stakeholders from two or more projects.

Do: Consistently create a safe space for employees to communicate risks related to the project(s).

Do: Ensure the right tools are being leveraged for in-office, hybrid, and virtual environments to support project collaboration.

Do: Leverage a project management software to reduce unnecessary communications.

OUTCOME

Stakeholder Adoption

• Create a standard communication template so stakeholders can easily find and apply communications.

Resource Allocation

• Understand what the various asks of IT are so employees can be adequately assigned to tasks.

Meet Responsibly

• Project status meetings are rarely valuable or insightful. Use meetings for collaboration, troubleshooting, and knowledge sharing.

Encourage Engagement

• Recognize employees and their work against critical milestones, especially for projects that have a long timeline.

Communications for everyday IT

Engage employees and drive results with clear and consistent communications.

DEFINING INSIGHT

Employees are looking for empathy to be demonstrated by those they are interacting with, from their peers to managers. Yet, we rarely provide it.

Why does IT need to communicate on regularly with itself?

• Regular communication ensures employees are valued, empowered, and clear about their expectations.
• 97% of employees believe that their ability to perform their tasks efficiently is impacted by communication (Expert Market, 2022).

FRAMEWORK

CHECKLIST

Do’s & Don’ts of Communicating within IT:

Do: Have responses for likely questions prepared and ready to go.

Do: Ensure that all leaders are sharing the same messages with their teams.

Do: Avoid providing irrelevant or confusing information.

Do: Speak with your team on a regular basis.

Do: Reinforce the messages of the organization every chance possible.

Do: Ensure employees feel empowered to do their jobs effectively.

Do: Engage employees in dialogue. The worst employee experience is when they are only spoken at, not engaged with.

OUTCOME

Increased Collaboration

• Operating in a vacuum or silo is no longer an option. Enable employees to successfully collaborate and deliver holistic results.

Role Clarity

• Clear expectations and responsibilities eliminate confusion and blame game. Engage employees and create a positive work culture with role clarity.

Prevent Rumors

• Inconsistent communication often leads to information sharing and employees spreading an (in)accurate narrative.

Organizational Insight

• Employees trust the organization’s direction because they are aware of the different activities taking place and provided with a rationale about decisions.

Case Study

Amazon

INDUSTRY
E-Commerce

SOURCE
Harvard Business Review

Jeff Bezos has definitely taken on unorthodox approaches to business and leadership, but one that many might not know about is his approach to communication. Some of the key elements that he focused on in the early 2000s when Amazon was becoming a multi-billion-dollar empire included:

• Banning PowerPoint for all members of the leadership team. They had to learn to communicate without the crutch of the most commonly used presentation tool.
• Leveraging memos that included specific action steps and clear nouns
• Reducing all communication to an eighth-grade reading level, including pitches for new products (e.g. Kindle).

Results

While he was creating the Amazon empire, 85% of Jeff Bezos’ communication was written in a way that an eighth grader could read. Communicating in a way that was easy to understand and encouraging his leadership team to do so as well is one of the many reasons this business has grown to an estimated value of over $800B.

“If you cannot simplify a message and communicate it compellingly, believe me, you cannot get the masses to follow you.”
– Indra Nooyi, in Harvard Business Review, 2022

Communication competency expectations

Communication is a business skill; not a technical skill.

Source: Skills Framework for the Information Age, 2021

Key KPIs for communication with any stakeholder

Measuring communication is hard; use these to determine effectiveness.

Standard workshop communication activities

Introduction
Communications overview.

Plan
Plan your communications using a strategic tool.

Compose
Create your own message.

Deliver
Practice delivering your own message.

Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Research contributors and experts

Anuja Agrawal
National Communications Director
PwC

Anuja is an accomplished global communications professional, with extensive experience in the insurance, banking, financial, and professional services industries in Asia, the US, and Canada. She is currently the National Communications Director at PwC Canada. Her prior work experience includes communication leadership roles at Deutsche Bank, GE, Aviva, and Veritas. Anuja works closely with senior business leaders and key stakeholders to deliver measurable results and effective change and culture building programs. Anuja has experience in both internal and external communications, including strategic leadership communication, employee engagement, PR and media management, digital and social media, and M&A/change and crisis management. Anuja believes in leveraging digital tools and technology-enabled solutions, combined with in-person engagement, to help improve the quality of dialogue and increase interactive communication within the organization to help build an inclusive culture of belonging.

Nastaran Bisheban
Chief Technology Officer
KFC Canada

A passionate technologist, and seasoned transformational leader. A software engineer and computer scientist by education, a certified Project Manager that holds an MBA in Leadership with Honors and Distinction from University of Liverpool. A public speaker on various disciplines of technology and data strategy with a Harvard Business School executive leadership program training to round it all. Challenges status quo and conventional practices; is an advocate for taking calculated risk and following the principle of continuous improvement. With multiple computer software and project management publications she is a strategic mentor and board member on various non-profit organizations. Nastaran sees the world as a better place only when everyone has a seat at the table and is an active advocate for diversity and inclusion.

Heidi Davidson
Co-Founder & CEO
Galvanize Worldwide and Galvanize On Demand

Dr. Heidi Davidson is the co-founder and CEO of Galvanize Worldwide, the largest distributed network of marketing and communications experts in the world. She also is the co-founder and CEO of Galvanize On Demand, a tech platform that matches marketing and communications freelancers with client projects. Now with 167 active experts, the Galvanize team delivers startup advisory work, outsourced marketing, training, and crisis communications to organizations of all sizes. Before Galvanize, Heidi spent four years as part of the turnaround team at BlackBerry as the Chief Communications Officer and SVP of Corporate Marketing, where she helped the company move from a device manufacturer to a security software provider.

Eli Gladstone
Co-Founder
Speaker Labs

Eli is a co-founder of Speaker Labs. He has spent over six years helping countless individuals overcome their public speaking fears and communicate with clarity and confidence. When he’s not coaching others on how to build and deliver the perfect presentation, you’ll probably find him reading some weird books, teaching his kids how to ski or play tennis, or trying to develop a good-enough jumpshot to avoid being a liability on the basketball court.

Francisco Mahfuz
Keynote Speaker & Storytelling Coach

Francisco Mahfuz has been telling stories in front of audiences for a decade and even became a National Champion of public speaking. Today, Francisco is a keynote speaker and storytelling coach and offers communication training to individuals and international organizations and has worked with organizations like Pepsi, HP, the United Nations, Santander, and Cornell University. He’s the author of Bare: A Guide to Brutally Honest Public Speaking and the host of The Storypowers Podcast, and he’s been part of the IESE MBA communications course since 2020. He’s received a BA in English Literature from Birkbeck University in London.

Sarah Shortreed
EVP & CTO
ATCO Ltd.

Sarah Shortreed is ATCO’s Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Her responsibilities include leading ATCO’s Information Technology (IT) function as it continues to drive agility and collaboration throughout ATCO’s global businesses and expanding and enhancing its enterprise IT strategy, including establishing ATCO’s technology roadmap for the future. Ms. Shortreed’s skill and expertise are drawn from her more than 30-year career that spans many industries and includes executive roles in business consulting, complex multi-stakeholder programs, operations, sales, customer relationship management, and product management. She was recently the Chief Information Officer at Bruce Power and has previously worked at BlackBerry, IBM, and Union Gas. She sits on the Board of Governors for the University of Western Ontario and is the current Chair of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Committee at the Conference Board of Canada.

Eric Silverberg
Co-Founder
Speaker Labs

Eric is a co-founder of Speaker Labs and has helped thousands of people build their public speaking confidence and become more dynamic and engaging communicators. When he’s not running workshops to help people grow in their careers, there’s a good chance you’ll find him with his wife and dog, drinking Diet Coke, and rewatching iconic episodes of the reality TV show Survivor! He’s such a die-hard fan, that you’ll probably see him playing the game one day.

Stephanie Stewart
Communications Officer & DR Coordinator
Info Security Services Simon Fraser University

Steve Strout
President
Miovision Technologies

Mr. Strout is a recognized and experienced technology leader with extensive experience in delivering value. He has successfully led business and technology transformations by leveraging many dozens of complex global SFDC, Oracle, and SAP projects. He is especially adept at leading what some call “Project Rescues” – saving people’s careers where projects have gone awry; always driving “on-time and on-budget.” Mr. Strout is the current President of Miovision Technologies and the former CEO and board member of the Americas’ SAP Users” Group (ASUG). His wealth of practical knowledge comes from 30 years of extensive experience in many CxO and executive roles at some prestigious organizations such as Vonage, Sabre, BlackBerry, Shred-it, The Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters), and Morris Communications. He has served on boards including Customer Advisory Boards of Apple, AgriSource Data, Dell, Edgewise, EMC, LogiSense, Socrates.ai, Spiro Carbon Group, and Unifi.

Info-Tech Research Group Contributors:

Plus an additional two contributors who wish to remain anonymous.

Related Info-Tech Research

Boardroom Presentation Review

• You will come away with a clear, concise, and compelling board presentation that IT leaders can feel confident presenting in front of their board of directors.
• Add improvements to your current board presentation in terms of visual appeal and logical flow to ensure it resonates with your board of directors.
• Leverage a best-of-breed presentation template.

Build a Better Manager

• Management skills training is needed, but organizations are struggling to provide training that makes a long-term difference in the skills managers actually use in their day to day.
• Many training programs are ineffective because they offer the wrong content, deliver it in a way that is not memorable, and are not aligned with the IT department’s business objectives.

Crisis Communication Guides

During a crisis it is important to communicate to employees through messages that convey calm and are transparent and tailored to your audience. Use the Crisis Communication Guides to:

• Draft a communication strategy.
• Tailor messages to your audience.
• Draft employee crisis communications.

Bibliography

“Communication in the Workplace Statistics: Importance and Effectiveness in 2022.” TeamStage, 2022.

Gallo, Carmine. “How Great Leaders Communicate.” Harvard Business Review, 23 November 2022

Guthrie, Georgina. “Why Good Internal Communications Matter Now More than Ever.” Nulab, 15 December 2021.

Lambden, Duncan. “The Importance of Effective Workplace Communication – Statistics for 2022.” Expert Market, 13 June 2022.

“Mapping SFIA Levels of Responsibilities to Behavioural Factors.” Skills Framework for the Information Age, 2021.

McCreary, Gale. “How to Measure the Effectiveness of Communication: 14 Steps.” WikiHow, 31 March 2023.

Nowak, Marcin. “Top 7 Communication Problems in the Workplace.” MIT Enterprise Forum CEE, 2021.

Nunn, Philip. “Messaging That Works: A Unique Framework to Maximize Communication Success.” iabc, 26 October 2020.

Picincu, Andra. “How to Measure Effective Communications.” Small Business Chron. 12 January 2021.

Price. David A. “Pixar Story Rules.” Stories From the Frontiers of Knowledge, 2011.

Roberts, Dan. “How CIOs Become Visionary Communicators.” CIO, 2019.

Schlesinger, Mark. “Why building effective communication skill in IT is incredibly important.” Forbes, 2021.

Stanten, Andrew. “Planning for the Worst: Crisis Communications 101.” CIO, 25 May 2017.

State of the American Workplace Report. Gallup, 6 February 2020.

“The CIO Revolution.” IBM, 2021.

“The State of High Performing Teams in Tech 2022.” Hypercontex, 2022.

Walters, Katlin. “Top 5 Ways to Measure Internal Communication.” Intranet Connections, 30 May 2019.

The First 100 Days As CIO

Partner with Info-Tech for success in this crucial period of transition.

Analyst Perspective

The first 100 days refers to the 10 days before you start and the first three months on the job.

“The original concept of ‘the first 100 days’ was popularized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who passed a battery of new legislation after taking office as US president during the Great Depression. Now commonly extended to the business world, the first 100 days of any executive role is a critically important period for both the executive and the organization.

But not every new leader should follow FDR’s example of an action-first approach. Instead, finding the right balance of listening and taking action is the key to success during this transitional period. The type of the organization and the mode that it’s in serves as the fulcrum that determines where the point of perfect balance lies. An executive facing a turnaround situation will want to focus on more action more quickly. One facing a sustaining success situation or a realignment situation will want to spend more time listening before taking action.” (Brian Jackson, Research Director, CIO, Info-Tech Research Group)

Executive summary

Situation

• You’ve been promoted from within to the role of CIO.
• You’ve been hired externally to take on the role of CIO.

Complication

Studies show that two years after a new executive transition, as many as half are regarded as failures or disappointments (McKinsey). First impressions are hard to overcome, and a CIO’s first 100 days are heavily weighted in terms of how others will assess their overall success. The best way to approach this period is determined by both the size and the mode of an organization.

Resolution

• Work with Info-Tech to prepare a 100-day plan that will position you for success.
• Collaborate to collect the details needed to identify the right mode for your organization and determine how it will influence your plan.
• Use Info-Tech’s diagnostic tools to align your vision with that of business executives and form a baseline for future reference.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Foundational understanding must be achieved before you start.
   Hit the ground running before day one by using company documents and initial discussions to pin down the company’s type and mode.
2. Listen before you act (usually).
   In most situations, executives benefit from listening to peers and staff before taking action.
3. Identify quick wins early and often.
   Fix problems as soon as you recognize them to set the tone for your tenure.

The First 100 Days: Roadmap

Concierge service overview

Organize a call with your executive advisor every two weeks during your first 100 days. Info-Tech recommends completing our diagnostics during this period. If you’re not able to do so, instead complete the alternative activities marked with (a).

Call 1

Before you start: Day -10 to Day 1

Interview your predecessor

Interviewing your predecessor can help identify the organization’s mode and type.

Before reaching out to your predecessor, get a sense of whether they were viewed as successful or not. Ask your manager. If the predecessor remains within the organization in a different role, understand your relationship with them and how you'll be working together.

During the interview, make notes about follow-up questions you'll ask others at the organization.

Ask these open-ended questions in the interview:

• Tell me about the team.
• Tell me about your challenges.
• Tell me about a major project your team worked on. How did it go?
• Who/what has been helpful during your tenure?
• Who/what created barriers for you?
• What do your engagement surveys reveal?
• Tell me about your performance management programs and issues.
• What mistakes would you avoid if you could lead again?
• Why are you leaving?
• Could I reach out to you again in the future?

Learn the corporate structure

Identify the organization’s corporate structure type based on your initial conversations with company leadership. The type of structure will dictate how much control you'll have as a functional head and help you understand which stakeholders you'll need to collaborate with.

To Do:

• Review the organization’s structure list and identify whether the structure is functional, prioritized, or a matrix. If it's a matrix organization, determine if it's a strong matrix (project manager holds more authority), weak matrix (functional manager holds more authority), or balanced matrix (managers hold equal authority).

This organization is a ___________________ type.

Presentation Deck, slide 6

Determine the mode of the organization: STARS

Based on your interview process and discussions with company leadership, and using Michael Watkins’ STARS assessment, determine which mode your organization is in: startup, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, or sustaining success.

Knowing the mode of your organization will determine how you approach your 100-day plan. Depending on the mode, you'll rebalance your activities around the three categories of assess, listen, and deliver.

To Do:

• Review the STARS table on the right.

Based on your situation, prioritize activities in this way:

• Startup: assess, listen, deliver
• Turnaround: deliver, listen, assess
• Accelerated Growth: assess, listen, deliver
• Realignment: listen, assess, deliver
• Sustaining success: listen, assess, deliver

This organization is a ___________________ type.

(Source: Watkins, 2013.)

Presentation Deck, slide 6

Determine the mode of the organization: STARS

Satya Nadella's listen, lead, and launch approach

CASE STUDY

Industry Software
Source Gregg Keizer, Computerworld, 2014

When Satya Nadella was promoted to the CEO role at Microsoft in 2014, he received a Glassdoor approval rating of 85% and was given an "A" grade by industry analysts after his first 100 days. What did he do right? Created a sense of urgency by shaking up the senior leadership team. Already understood the culture as an insider. Listened a lot and did many one-on-one meetings. Established a vision communicated with a mantra that Microsoft would be "mobile-first, cloud-first." Met his words with actions. He launched Office for iPad and made many announcements for cloud platform Azure.

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Corp. (Image source: Microsoft)

Listen to 'The First 100 Days' podcast – Alan Fong

Create a one-page introduction sheet to use in communications

As a new CIO, you'll have to introduce yourself to many people in the organization. To save time on communicating who you are as a person outside of the office, create a brief one-pager that includes a photo of you, where you were born and raised, and what your hobbies are. This helps make a connection more quickly so your conversations can focus on the business at hand rather than personal topics.

For your presentation deck, remove the personal details and just keep it professional. The personal aspects can be used as a one-pager for other communications. (Source: Personal interview with Denis Gaudreault, Country Lead, Intel.)

Presentation Deck, slide 5

Call 2

Day 1 to Day 15

Introduce yourself to your team

Prepare a 20-second pitch about yourself that goes beyond your name and title. Touch on your experience that's relevant to your new role or the industry you're in. Be straightforward about your own perceived strengths and weaknesses so that people know what to expect from you. Focus on the value you believe you'll offer the group and use humor and humility where you're comfortable. For example:

“Hi everyone, my name is John Miller. I have 15 years of experience marketing conferences like this one to vendors, colleges, and HR departments. What I’m good at, and the reason I'm here, is getting the right people, businesses, and great ideas in a room together. I'm not good on details; that's why I work with Tim. I promise that I'll get people excited about the conference, and the gifts and talents of everyone else in this room will take over from there. I'm looking forward to working with all of you.”

Have a structured set of questions ready that you can ask everyone.

For example:

• How well is the company performing based on expectations?
• What must the company do to sustain its financial performance and market competitiveness?
• How do you foresee the CIO contributing to the team?
• How have past CIOs performed from the perspective of the team?
• What would successful performance of this role look like to you? To your peers?
• What challenges and obstacles to success am I likely to encounter? What were the common challenges of my predecessor?
• How do you view the culture here and how do successful projects tend to get approved?
• What are your greatest challenges? How could I help you?

Get to know your sphere of influence: prepare to connect with a variety of people before you get down to work

Your ability to learn from others is critical at every stage in your first 100 days. Keep your sphere of influence in the loop as you progress through this period.

Write down the names, or at least the key people, in each segment of this diagram. This will serve as a quick reference when you're planning communications with others and will help you remember everyone as you're meeting lots of new people in your early days on the job.

• Everyone knows their networks are important.
• However, busy schedules can cause leaders to overlook their many audiences.
• Plan to meet and learn from all people in your sphere to gain a full spectrum of insights.

Presentation Deck, slide 29

Identify how your competitors are leveraging technology for competitive advantage

Competitor identification and analysis are critical steps for any new leader to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of their organization and develop a sense of strategic opportunity and environmental awareness.

Today’s CIO is accountable for driving innovation through technology. A competitive analysis will provide the foundation for understanding the current industry structure, rivalry within it, and possible competitive advantages for the organization.

Surveying your competitive landscape prior to the first day will allow you to come to the table prepared with insights on how to support the organization and ensure that you are not vulnerable to any competitive blind spots that may exist in the evaluations conducted by the organization already.

You will not be able to gain a nuanced understanding of the internal strengths and weaknesses until you are in the role, so focus on the external opportunities and how competitors are using technology to their advantage.

Info-Tech Best Practice

For a more in-depth approach to identifying and understanding relevant industry trends and turning them into insights, leverage the following Info-Tech blueprints:

• Think Like a Futurist
• CIO Trend Report 2019

Presentation Deck, slide 9

Assess the external competitive environment

INPUT: External research

OUTPUT: Competitor array

1. Conduct a broad analysis of the industry as a whole. Seek to answer the following questions:
   1. Are there market developments or new markets?
   2. Are there industry or lifestyle trends, e.g. move to mobile?
   3. Are there geographic changes in the market?
   4. Are there demographic changes that are shaping decision making?
   5. Are there changes in market demand?
2. Create a competitor array by identifying and listing key competitors. Try to be as broad as possible here and consider not only entrenched close competitors but also distant/future competitors that may disrupt the industry.
3. Identify the strengths, weaknesses, and key brand differentiators that each competitor brings to the table. For each strength and differentiator, brainstorm ways that IT-based innovation enables each. These will provide a toolkit for deeper conversations with your peers and your business stakeholders as you move further into your first 100 days.

Complete the CEO-CIO Alignment Program

INPUT: CEO-CEO Alignment Program (recommended)

OUTPUT: Desired and target state of IT maturity, Innovation goals, Top priorities

Materials: Presentation Deck, slides 11-13

Participants: CEO, CIO

Introduce the concept of the CEO-CIO Alignment Program using slide 10 of your presentation deck and the brief email text below.

Talk to your advisory contact at Info-Tech about launching the program. More information is available on Info-Tech’s website.

Once the report is complete, import the results into your presentation:

• Slide 11, the CEO’s current and desired states
• Slide 12, IT innovation goals
• Slide 13, top projects and top departments from the CEO and the CIO

Include any immediate recommendations you have.

Hello CEO NAME,

I’m excited to get started in my role as CIO, and to hit the ground running, I’d like to make sure that the IT department is aligned with the business leadership. We will accomplish this using Info-Tech Research Group’s CEO-CIO Alignment Program. It’s a simple survey of 20 questions to be completed by the CEO and the CIO.

This survey will help me understand your perception and vision as I get my footing as CIO. I’ll be able to identify and build core IT processes that will automate IT-business alignment going forward and create an effective IT strategy that helps eliminate impediments to business growth.

Research shows that IT departments that are effectively aligned to business goals achieve more success, and I’m determined to make our IT department as successful as possible. I look forward to further detailing the benefits of this program to you and answering any questions you may have the next time we speak.

Regards,
CIO NAME

New KPIs for CEO-CIO Alignment — Recommended

Info-Tech CEO-CIO Alignment Program

Info-Tech's CEO-CIO Alignment Program is set up to build IT-business alignment in any organization. It helps the CIO understand CEO perspectives and priorities. The exercise leads to useful IT performance indicators, clarifies IT’s mandate and which new technologies it should invest in, and maps business goals to IT priorities.

Benefits

Master the Basics Cut through the jargon. Take a comprehensive look at the CEO perspective.	Target Alignment Identify how IT can support top business priorities. Address CEO-CIO differences.	Start on the Right Path Get on track with the CIO vision. Use correct indicators and metrics to evaluate IT from day one.

Additional materials are available on Info-Tech’s website.

The desired maturity level of IT — Alternative

Step 1: Where are we today? Determine where the CEO sees the current overall maturity level of the IT organization. Step 2: Where do we want to be as an organization? Determine where the CEO wants the IT organization to be in order to effectively support the strategic direction of the business.

Presentation Deck, slide 11

Tim Cook's powerful use of language

CASE STUDY

Industry Consumer technology
Source Carmine Gallo, Inc., 2019

Apple CEO Tim Cook, an internal hire, had big shoes to fill after taking over from the late Steve Jobs. Cook's ability to control how the company is perceived is a big credit to his success. How does he do it? His favorite five words are “The way I see it..." These words allow him to take a line of questioning and reframe it into another perspective that he wants to get across. Similarly, he'll often say, "Let me tell you the way I look at it” or "To put it in perspective" or "To put it in context." In your first two weeks on the job, try using these phrases in your conversations with peers and direct reports. It demonstrates that you value their point of view but are independently coming to conclusions about the situation at hand.

Tim Cook, CEO, Apple Inc. (Image source: Apple)

Listen to 'The First 100 Days' podcast – Denis Gaudreault

Inform your team that you plan to do an IT Management & Governance Diagnostic survey

Run the diagnostic program or use the alternative activities to complete your presentation

INPUT: IT Management & Governance Diagnostic (recommended)

OUTPUT: Process to improve first, Processes important to the business

Materials: Presentation Deck, slides 19-20

Participants: CIO, IT staff

Introduce the IT Management & Governance Diagnostic survey that will help you form your IT strategy.

Explain that you want to understand current IT capabilities and you feel a formal approach is best. You’ll also be using this approach as an important metric to track your department’s success. Tell them that Info-Tech Research Group will be conducting the survey and it’s important to you that they take action on the email when it’s sent to them.

Example email:

Hello TEAM,

I appreciate meeting each of you, and so far I’m excited about the talents and energy on the team. Now I need to understand the processes and capabilities of our department in a deeper way. I’d like to map our process landscape against an industry-wide standard, then dive deeper into those processes to understand if our team is aligned. This will help us be accountable to the business and plan the year ahead. Advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group will be reaching out to you with a simple survey that shouldn’t take too long to complete. It’s important to me that you pay attention to that message and complete the survey as soon as possible.

Regards,
CIO NAME

Call 3

Day 16 to Day 30

Leverage team interviews as a source of determining organizational culture

Info-Tech recommends that you hold group conversations with your team to uncover their opinions of the current organizational culture. This not only helps build transparency between you and your team but also gives you another means of observing behavior and reactions as you listen to team members’ characterizations of the current culture.

Note: It is inherently difficult for people to verbalize what constitutes a culture – your strategy for extracting this information will require you to ask indirect questions to solicit the highest value information.

Questions for Discussion:

• What about the current organizational environment do you think most contributes to your success?
• What barriers do you experience as you try to accomplish your work?
• What is your favorite quality that is present in our organization?
• What is the one thing you would most like to change about this organization?
• Do the organization's policies and procedures support your efforts to accomplish work or do they impede your progress?
• How effective do you think IT’s interactions are with the larger organization?
• What would you consider to be IT’s top three guiding principles?
• What kinds of people fail in this organization?

See Info-Tech’s Cultural Archetype Calculator.

Use the Competing Values Framework to define your organization’s cultural archetype

THE COMPETING VALUES FRAMEWORK (CVF):

CVF represents the synthesis of academic study of 39 indicators of effectiveness for organizations. Using a statistical analysis, two polarities that are highly predictive of differences in organizational effectiveness were isolated: Internal focus and integration vs. external focus and differentiation. Stability and control vs. flexibility and discretion. By plotting these dimensions on a matrix of competing values, four main cultural archetypes are identified with their own value drivers and theories of effectiveness.

Presentation Deck, slide 16

Create a cultural adjustment plan

Now that you've assessed the cultural archetype, you can plan an appropriate approach to shape the culture in a positive way. When new executives want to change culture, there are a few main options at hand:

Autonomous evolution: Encourage teams to learn from each other. Empower hybrid teams to collaborate and reward teams that perform well.

Planned and managed change: Create steering committee and project-oriented taskforces to work in parallel. Appoint employees that have cultural traits you'd like to replicate to hold responsibility for these bodies.

Cultural destruction: When a toxic culture needs to be eliminated, get rid of its carriers. Putting new managers or directors in place with the right cultural traits can be a swift and effective way to realign.

Each option boils down to creating the right set of incentives and deterrents. What behaviors will you reward and which ones will you penalize? What do those consequences look like? Sometimes, but not always, some structural changes to the team will be necessary. If you feel these changes should be made, it's important to do it sooner rather than later. (Source: “Enlarging Your Sphere of Influence in Your Organization,” MindTools Corporate, 2014.)

As you're thinking about shaping a desired culture, it's helpful to have an easy way to remember the top qualities you want to espouse. Try creating an acronym that makes it easy for staff to remember. For example: RISE could remind your staff to be Responsive, Innovative, Sustainable, and Engaging (RISE). Draw upon your business direction from your manager to help produce desired qualities (Source: Jennifer Schaeffer).

Presentation Deck, slide 17

Gary Davenport’s welcome “surprise”

CASE STUDY

Industry Telecom
Source Interview with Gary Davenport

After Gary Davenport was hired on as VP of IT at MTS Allstream, his first weekend on the job was spent at an all-executive offsite meeting. There, he learned from the CEO that the IT department had a budget reduction target of 25%, like other departments in the company. “That takes your breath away,” Davenport says. He decided to meet the CEO monthly to communicate his plans to reduce spending while trying to satisfy business stakeholders. His top priorities were: Stabilize IT after seven different leaders in a five-year period. Get the IT department to be respected. To act like business owners instead of like servants. Better manage finances and deliver on projects. During Davenport’s 7.5-year tenure, the IT department became one of the top performers at MTS Allstream.

Gary Davenport’s first weekend on the job at MTS Allstream included learning about a 25% reduction target. (Image source: Ryerson University)

Listen to 'The First 100 Days' podcast – David Penny & Andrew Wertkin

Initiate IT Management & Governance Diagnostic — Recommended

Info-Tech Management & Governance Diagnostic

Talk to your Info-Tech executive advisor about launching the survey shortly after informing your team to expect it. You'll just have to provide the names and email addresses of the staff you want to be involved. Once the survey is complete, you'll harvest materials from it for your presentation deck. See slides 19 and 20 of your deck and follow the instructions on what to include.

Benefits

Explore IT Processes Dive deeper into performance. Highlight problem areas.	Align IT Team Build consensus by identifying opposing views.	Ownership & Accountability Identify process owners and hold team members accountable.

Additional materials available on Info-Tech’s website.

Conduct a high-level analysis of current IT capabilities — Alternative

INPUT: Interviews with IT leadership team, Capabilities graphic on next slide

OUTPUT: High-level understanding of current IT capabilities

Run this activity if you're not able to conduct the IT Management & Governance Diagnostic.

Schedule meetings with your IT leadership team. (In smaller organizations, interviewing everyone may be acceptable.) Provide them a list of the core capabilities that IT delivers upon and ask them to rate them on an effectiveness scale of 1-5, with a short rationale for their score.

• 1. Not effective (NE)
• 2. Somewhat Effective (SE)
• 3. Effective (E)
• 4. Very Effective (VE)
• 5. Extremely Effective (EE)

Presentation Deck, slide 21

Use the following set of IT capabilities for your assessment

Quick wins: CEO-CIO Alignment Program

Complete this while waiting on the IT M&G survey results. Based on your completed CEO-CIO Alignment Report, identify the initiatives you can tackle immediately.

If you are here...	And want to be here...	Drive toward...	Innovate around...
Business Partner	Innovator	Leading business transformation	Emerging technologies Analytical capabilities Risk management Customer-facing tech Enterprise architecture
Trusted Operator	Business Partner	Optimizing business process and supporting business transformation	IT strategy and governance Business architecture Projects Resource management Data quality
Firefighter	Trusted Operator	Optimize IT processes and services	Business applications Service management Stakeholder management Work orders
Unstable	Firefighter	Reduce use disruption and adequately support the business	Network and infrastructure Service desk Security User devices

Call 4

Day 31 to Day 45

Inform your peers that you plan to do a CIO Business Vision survey to gauge your stakeholders’ satisfaction

Run the diagnostic program or use the alternative activities to complete your presentation

INPUT: CIO Business Vision survey (recommended)

OUTPUT: True measure of business satisfaction with IT

Materials: Presentation Deck, slide 30

Participants: CIO, IT staff

Meet the business leaders at your organization face-to-face if possible. If you can't meet in person, try a video conference to establish some rapport. At the end of your introduction and after listening to what your colleague has to say, introduce the CIO Business Vision Diagnostic.

Explain that you want to understand how to meet their business needs and you feel a formal approach is best. You'll also be using this approach as an important metric to track your department's success. Tell them that Info-Tech Research Group will be conducting the survey and it’s important to you that they take the survey when the email is sent to them.

Example email:

Hello PEER NAMES,

I'm arranging for Info-Tech Research Group to invite you to take a survey that will be important to me. The CIO Business Vision survey will help me understand how to meet your business needs. It will only take about 15 minutes of your time, and the top-line results will be shared with the organization. We will use the results to plan initiatives for the future that will improve your satisfaction with IT.

Regards,
CIO NAME

Gain feedback on your initial assessments from your IT team

There are two strategies for gaining feedback on your initial assessments of the organization from the IT team:

1. Review your personal assessments with the relevant members of your IT organization as a group. This strategy can help to build trust and an open channel for communication between yourself and your team; however, it also runs the risk of being impacted by groupthink.
2. Ask for your team to complete their own assessments for you to compare and contrast. This strategy can help extract more candor from your team, as they are not expected to communicate what may be nuanced perceptions of organizational weaknesses or criticisms of the way certain capabilities function.

Who you involve in this process will be impacted by the size of your organization. For larger organizations, involve everyone down to the manager level. In smaller organizations, you may want to involve everyone on the IT team to get an accurate lay of the land.

Areas for Review:

• Strategic Document Review: Are there any major themes or areas of interest that were not covered in my initial assessment?
• Competitor Array: Are there any initiatives in flight to leverage new technologies?
• Current State of IT Maturity: Does IT’s perception align with the CEO’s? Where do you believe IT has been most effective? Least effective?
• IT’s Key Priorities: Does IT’s perception align with the CEO’s?
• Key Performance Indicators: How has IT been measured in the past?

Info-Tech Best Practice

You need your team’s hearts and minds or you risk a short tenure. Overemphasizing business commitment by neglecting to address your IT team until after you meet your business stakeholders will result in a disenfranchised group. Show your team their importance.

Susan Bowen's talent maximization

CASE STUDY

Industry Infrastructure Services
Source Interview with Susan Bowen

Susan Bowen was promoted to be the president of Cogeco Peer 1, an infrastructure services firm, when it was still a part of Cogeco Communications. Part of her mandate was to help spin out the business to a new owner, which occurred when it was acquired by Digital Colony. The firm was renamed Aptum and Bowen was put in place as CEO, which was not a certainty despite her position as president at Cogeco Peer 1. She credits her ability to put the right talent in the right place as part of the reason she succeeded. After becoming president, she sought a strong commitment from her directors. She gave them a choice about whether they'd deliver on a new set of expectations – or not. She also asks her leadership on a regular basis if they are using their talent in the right way. While it's tempting for directors to want to hold on to their best employees, those people might be able to enable many more people if they can be put in another place. Bowen fully rounded out her leadership team after Aptum was formed. She created a chief operating officer and a chief infrastructure officer. This helped put in place more clarity around roles at the firm and put an emphasis on client-facing services.

Susan Bowen, CEO, Aptum (Image source: Aptum)

Listen to 'The First 100 Days' podcast – Susan Bowen

Initiate CIO Business Vision survey – new KPIs for stakeholder management — Recommended

Info-Tech CIO Business Vision

Be sure to effectively communicate the context of this survey to your business stakeholders before you launch it. Plan to talk about your plans to introduce it in your first meetings with stakeholders. When ready, let your executive advisor know you want to launch the tool and provide the names and email addresses of the stakeholders you want involved. After you have the results, harvest the materials required for your presentation deck. See slide 30 and follow the instructions on what to include.

Benefits

Key Stakeholders Clarify the needs of the business.	Credibility Create transparency.	Improve Measure IT’s progress.	Focus Find what’s important.

Additional materials are available on Info-Tech’s website.

Create a catalog of key stakeholder details to reference prior to future conversations — Alternative

Only conduct this activity if you’re not able to run the CIO Business Vision diagnostic.

Use the Organizational Catalog as a personal cheat sheet to document the key details around each of your stakeholders, including your CEO when possible.

The catalog will be an invaluable tool to keep the competing needs of your different stakeholders in line, while ensuring you are retaining the information to build the political capital needed to excel in the C-suite.

Note: It is important to keep this document private. While you may want to communicate components of this information, ensure your catalog remains under lock and (encryption) key.

Info-Tech Insight

While profiling your stakeholders is important, do not be afraid to profile yourself as well. Visualizing how your interests overlap with those of your stakeholders can provide critical information on how to manage your communications so that those on the receiving end are hearing exactly what they need.

Activity: Conduct interviews with your key business stakeholders — Alternative

1. Once you have identified your key stakeholders through your interviews with your boss and your IT team, schedule a set of meetings with those individuals.
2. Use the meetings to get to know your stakeholders, their key priorities and initiatives, and their perceptions of the effectiveness of IT.
   1. Use the probative questions to the right to elicit key pieces of information.
   2. Refer to the Organizational Catalog tool for more questions to dig deeper in each category. Ensure that you are taking notes separate from the tool and are keeping the tool itself secure, as it will contain private information specific to your interests.
3. Following each meeting, record the results of your conversation and any key insights in the Organizational Catalog. Refer to the following slide for more details.

Questions for Discussion:

• Be indirect about your personal questions – share stories that will elicit details about their interests, kids, etc.
• What are your most critical/important initiatives for the year?
• What are your key revenue streams, products, and services?
• What are the most important ways that IT supports your success? What is your satisfaction level with those services?
• Are there any current in-flight projects or initiatives that are a current pain point? How can IT assist to alleviate challenges?
• How is your success measured? What are your targets for the year on those metrics?

Presentation Deck, slide 34

Call 5

Day 46 to Day 60

Inform your team that you plan to do an IT staffing assessment

Introduce the IT Staffing Assessment that will help you get the most out of your team

INPUT: Email template

OUTPUT: Ready to launch diagnostic

Materials: Email template, List of staff, Sample of diagnostic

Participants: CIO, IT staff

Explain that you want to understand how the IT staff is currently spending its time by function and by activity. You want to take a formal approach to this task and also assess the team’s feelings about its effectiveness across different processes. The results of the assessment will serve as the foundation that helps you improve your team’s effectiveness within the organization.

Example email:

Hello PEER NAMES,

The feedback I've heard from the team since joining the company has been incredibly useful in beginning to formulate my IT strategy. Now I want to get a clear picture of how everyone is spending their time, especially across different IT functions and activities. This will be an opportunity for you to share feedback on what we're doing well, what we need to do more of, and what we're missing. Expect to receive an email invitation to take this survey from Info-Tech Research Group. It's important to me that you complete the survey as soon as you're can. Attached you’ll find an example of the report this will generate. Thank you again for providing your time and feedback.

Regards,
CIO NAME

Wayne Berger's shortcut to solve staffing woes

CASE STUDY

Industry Office leasing
Source Interview with Wayne Berger

Wayne Berger was hired to be the International Workplace Group (IWG) CEO for Canada and Latin America in 2014. Wayne approached his early days with the office space leasing firm as a tour of sorts, visiting nearly every one of the 48 office locations across Canada to host town hall meetings. He heard from staff at every location that they felt understaffed. But instead of simply hiring more staff, Berger actually reduced the workforce by 33%. He created a more flexible approach to staffing: Employees no longer just reported to work at one office; instead, they were ready to go to wherever they were most needed in a specific geographic area. He centralized all back-office functions for the company so that not every office had to do its own bookkeeping. Finally, he changed the labor profile to consist of full-time staff, part-time staff, and time-on-demand workers.

Wayne Berger, CEO, IWG Plc (Image source: IWG)

Listen to 'The First 100 Days' podcast – Wayne Berger

Initiate IT Staffing Assessment – new KPIs to track IT performance — Recommended

Info-Tech IT Staffing Assessment

Info-Tech’s IT Staffing Assessment provides benchmarking of key metrics against 4,000 other organizations. Dashboard-style reports provide key metrics at a glance, including a time breakdown by IT function and by activity compared against business priorities. Run this survey at about the 45-day mark of your first 90 days. Its insights will be used to inform your long-term IT strategy.

Benefits

Right-Size IT Headcount Find the right level for stakeholder satisfaction.	Allocate Staff Correctly Identify staff misalignments with priorities.	Maximize Teams Identify how to drive staff.

Additional materials are available on Info-Tech’s website.

Quick wins: Make recommendations based on IT Management & Governance Framework

Complete this exercise while waiting on the IT Staffing Assessment results. Based on your completed IT Management & Governance report, identify the initiatives you can tackle immediately. You can conduct this as a team exercise by following these steps:

1. Create a shortlist of initiatives based on the processes that were identified as high need but scored low in effectiveness. Think as broadly as possible during this initial brainstorming.
2. Write each initiative on a sticky note and conduct a high-level analysis of the amount of effort that would be required to complete it, as well as its alignment with the achievement of business objectives.
3. Draw the matrix below on a whiteboard and place each sticky note onto the matrix based on its potential impact and difficulty to address.

Call 6

Day 61 to Day 75

Run a start, stop, continue exercise with your IT staff — Alternative

This is an alternative activity to running an IT Staffing Assessment, which contains a start/stop/continue assessment. This activity can be facilitated with a flip chart or a whiteboard. Create three pages or three columns and label them Start, Stop, and Continue.

Hand out sticky notes to each team member and then allow time for individual brainstorming. Instruct them to write down their contributions for each category on the sticky notes. After a few minutes, have everyone stick their notes in the appropriate category on the board. Discuss as a group and see what themes emerge. Record the results that you want to share in your presentation deck (GroupMap).

Gather your team and explain the meaning of these categories:

Start: Activities you're not currently doing but should start doing very soon.

Stop: Activities you're currently doing but aren’t working and should cease.

Continue: Things you're currently doing and are working well.

Presentation Deck, slide 24

Determine the alignment of IT commitments with business objectives

INPUT: Interviews with IT leadership team

OUTPUT: High-level understanding of in-flight commitments and investments

Run this only as an alternative to the IT Management & Governance Diagnostic.

1. Schedule meetings with IT leadership to understand what commitments have been made to the business in terms of new products, projects, or enhancements.
2. Determine the following about IT’s current investment mix:
   1. What are the current IT investments and assets? How do they align to business goals?
   2. What investments in flight are related to which information assets?
   3. Are there any immediate risks identified for these key investments?
   4. What are the primary business issues that demand attention from IT consistently?
   5. What choices remain undecided in terms of strategic direction of the IT organization?
3. Document your key investments and commitments as well as any points of misalignment between objectives and current commitments as action items to address in your long-term plans. If they are small fixes, consider them during your quick-win identification.

Presentation Deck, slide 25

Determine the alignment of IT commitments with business objectives

Run this only as an alternative to the IT Staffing Assessment diagnostic.

Schedule meetings with IT leadership to understand what commitments have been made to the business in terms of new products, projects, or enhancements.

Determine the following about IT’s current investment mix:

• What are the current IT investments and assets?
• How do they align to business goals?
• What in-flight investments are related to which information assets?
• Are there any immediate risks identified for these key investments?
• What are the primary business issues that demand attention from IT consistently?
• What remains undecided in terms of strategic direction of the IT organization?

Document your key investments and commitments, as well as any points of misalignment between objectives and current commitments, as action items to address in your long-term plans. If they are small-effort fixes, consider them during your quick-win identification.

Presentation Deck, slide 25

Make a categorized vendor list by IT process

As part of learning the IT team, you should also create a comprehensive list of vendors under contract. Collaborate with the finance department to get a clear view of how much of the IT budget is spent on specific vendors. Try to match vendors to the IT processes they serve from the IT M&G framework.

You should also organize your vendors based on their budget allocation. Go beyond just listing how much money you’re spending with each vendor and categorize them into either “transactional” relationships or “strategic relationships.” Use the grid below to organize them. Ideally, you’ll want most relationships to be high spend and strategic (Source: Gary Davenport).

Where to source your vendor list:

• Finance department
• Infrastructure managers
• Vendor manager in IT

Further reading: Manage Your Vendors Before They Manage You

Presentation Deck, slide 26

Jennifer Schaeffer’s short-timeline turnaround

CASE STUDY

Industry Education
Source Interview with Jennifer Schaeffer

Jennifer Schaeffer joined Athabasca University as CIO in November 2017. She was entering a turnaround situation as the all-online university lacked an IT strategy and had built up significant technical debt. Armed with the mandate of a third-party consultant that was supported by the president, Schaeffer used a people-first approach to construct her strategy. She met with all her staff, listening to them carefully regardless of role, and consulted with the administrative council and faculty members. She reflected that feedback in her plan or explained to staff why it wasn’t relevant for the strategy. She implemented a “strategic calendaring” approach for the organization, making sure that her team members were participating in meetings where their work was assessed and valued. Drawing on Spotify as an inspiration, she designed her teams in a way that everyone was connected to the customer experience. Given her short timeline to execute, she put off a deep skills analysis of her team for a later time, as well as creating a full architectural map of her technology stack. The outcome is that 2.5 years later, the IT department is unified in using the same tooling and optimization standards. It’s more flexible and ready to incorporate government changes, such as offering more accessibility options.

Jennifer Schaeffer took on the CIO role at Athabasca University in 2017 and was asked to create a five-year strategic plan in just six weeks. (Image source: Athabasca University)

Listen to 'The First 100 Days' podcast – Eric Wright

Call 7

Day 76 to Day 90

Finalize your vision – mission – values statement

A clear statement for your values, vision, and mission will help crystallize your IT strategy and communicate what you're trying to accomplish to the entire organization.

Mission: This statement describes the needs that IT was created to meet and answers the basic question of why IT exists.

Vision: Write a statement that captures your values. Remember that the vision statement sets out what the IT organization wants to be known for now and into the future.

Values: IT core values represent the standard axioms by which the IT department operates. Similar to the core values of the organization as a whole, IT’s core values are the set of beliefs or philosophies that guide its strategic actions.

Further reading: IT Vision and Mission Statements Template

Presentation Deck, slide 42

John Chen's new strategic vision

CASE STUDY

Industry Mobile Services
Source Sean Silcoff, The Globe and Mail

John Chen, known in the industry as a successful turnaround executive, was appointed BlackBerry CEO in 2014 following the unsuccessful launch of the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system and a new tablet. He spent his first three months travelling, talking to customers and suppliers, and understanding the company's situation. He assessed that it had a problem generating cash and had made some strategic errors, but there were many assets that could benefit from more investment. He was blunt about the state of BlackBerry, making cutting observations of the past mistakes of leadership. He also settled a key question about whether BlackBerry would focus on consumer or enterprise customers. He pointed to a base of 80,000 enterprise customers that accounted for 80% of revenue and chose to focus on that. His new mission for BlackBerry: to transform it from being a "mobile technology company" that pushes handset sales to "a mobile solutions company" that serves the mobile computing needs of its customers.

John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry, presents at BlackBerry Security Summit 2018 in New York City (Image source: Brian Jackson)

Listen to 'The First 100 Days' podcast – Erin Bury

Quick wins: Make recommendations based on the CIO Business Vision survey

Based on your completed CIO Business Vision survey, use the IT Satisfaction Scorecard to determine some initiatives. Focus on areas that are ranked as high importance to the business but low satisfaction. While all of the initiatives may be achievable given enough time, use the matrix below to identify the quick wins that you can focus on immediately. It’s important to not fail in your quick-win initiative.

• High Visibility, Low Risk: Best bet for demonstrating your ability to deliver value.
• Low Visibility, Low Risk: Worth consideration, depending on the level of effort required and the relative importance to the stakeholder.
• High Visibility, High Risk: Limit higher-risk initiatives until you feel you have gained trust from your stakeholders, demonstrating your ability to deliver.
• Low Visibility, High Risk: These will be your lowest value, quick-win initiatives. Keep them in a backlog for future consideration in case business objectives change.

Presentation Deck, slide 27

Create and communicate a post-100 plan

The last few slides of your presentation deck represent a roundup of all the assessments you’ve done and communicate your plan for the months ahead.

Slide 38. Based on the information on the previous slide and now knowing which IT capabilities need improvement and which business priorities are important to support, estimate where you'd like to see IT staff spend their time in the near future. Will you be looking to shift staff from one area to another? Will you be looking to hire staff?

Slide 39. Take your IT M&G initiatives from slide 19 and list them here. If you've already achieved a quick win, list it and mark it as completed to show what you've accomplished. Briefly outline the objectives, how you plan to achieve the result, and what measurement will indicate success.

Slide 40. Reflect your CIO Business Vision initiatives from slide 31 here.

Slide 41. Use this roadmap template to list your initiatives by roughly when they’ll be worked on and completed. Plan for when you’ll update your diagnostics.

Expert Contributors

	Alan Fong, Chief Technology Officer, Dealer-FX
	Andrew Wertkin, Chief Strategy Officer, BlueCat Networks David Penny, Chief Technology Officer, BlueCat Networks
	Susan Bowen, CEO, Aptum

	Erin Bury, CEO, Willful
	Denis Gaudreault, Country Manager, Intel Canada and Latin America
	Wayne Berger, CEO, IWG Plc

	Eric Wright, CEO, LexisNexis Canada
	Gary Davenport, past president of CIO Association” of Canada, former VP of IT, Enterprise Solutions Division, MTS AllStream
	Jennifer Schaeffer, VP of IT and CIO, Athabasca University

Bibliography

Beaudan, Eric. “Do you have what it takes to be an executive?” The Globe and Mail, 9 July 2018. Web.

Bersohn, Diana. “Go Live on Day One: The Path to Success for a New CIO.” PDF document. Accenture, 2015. Web.

Bradt, George. “Executive Onboarding When Promoted From Within To Follow A Successful Leader.” Forbes, 15 Nov. 2018. Web.

“CIO Stats: Length of CIO Tenure Varies By Industry.” CIO Journal, The Wall Street Journal. 15 Feb. 2017. Web.

“Enlarging Your Sphere of Influence in Your Organization: Your Learning and Development Guide to Getting People on Side.” MindTools Corporate, 2014.

“Executive Summary.” The CIO's First 100 Days: A Toolkit. PDF document. Gartner, 2012. Web.

Forbes, Jeff. “Are You Ready for the C-Suite?” KBRS, n.d. Web.

Gallo, Carmine. “Tim Cook Uses These 5 Words to Take Control of Any Conversation.” Inc., 9 Aug. 2019. Web.

Giles, Sunnie. “The Most Important Leadership Competencies, According to Leaders Around the World.” Harvard Business Review, 15 March 2016. Web.

Godin, Seth. “Ode: How to tell a great story.” Seth's Blog. 27 April 2006. Web.

Green, Charles W. “The horizontal dimension of race: Social culture.” Hope College Blog Network, 19 Oct. 2014. Web.

Hakobyan, Hayk. “On Louis Gerstner And IBM.” Hayk Hakobyan, n.d. Web.

Bibliography

Hargrove, Robert. Your First 100 Days in a New Executive Job, edited by Susan Youngquist. Kindle Edition. Masterful Coaching Press, 2011.

Heathfield, Susan M. “Why ‘Blink’ Matters: The Power of Your First Impressions." The Balance Careers, 25 June 2019. Web.

Hillis, Rowan, and Mark O'Donnell. “How to get off to a flying start in your new job.” Odgers Berndtson, 29 Nov. 2018. Web.

Karaevli, Ayse, and Edward J. Zajac. “When Is an Outsider CEO a Good Choice?” MIT Sloan Management Review, 19 June 2012. Web.

Keizer, Gregg. “Microsoft CEO Nadella Aces First-100-Day Test.” Computerworld, 15 May 2014. Web.

Keller, Scott, and Mary Meaney. “Successfully transitioning to new leadership roles.” McKinsey & Company, May 2018. Web.

Kress, R. “Director vs. Manager: What You Need to Know to Advance to the Next Step.” Ivy Exec, 2016. Web.

Levine, Seth. “What does it mean to be an ‘executive’.” VC Adventure, 1 Feb. 2018. Web.

Lichtenwalner, Benjamin. “CIO First 90 Days.” PDF document. Modern Servant Leader, 2008. Web.

Nawaz, Sabina. “The Biggest Mistakes New Executives Make.” Harvard Business Review, 15 May 2017. Web.

Pruitt, Sarah. “Fast Facts on the 'First 100 Days.‘” History.com, 22 Aug. 2018. Web.

Rao, M.S. “An Action Plan for New CEOs During the First 100 Days.” Training, 4 Oct. 2014. Web.

Reddy, Kendra. “It turns out being a VP isn't for everyone.” Financial Post, 17 July 2012. Web.

Silcoff, Sean. “Exclusive: John Chen’s simple plan to save BlackBerry.” The Globe & Mail, 24 Feb. 2014. Web.

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“Start Stop Continue Retrospective.” GroupMap, n.d. Web.

Surrette, Mark. “Lack of Rapport: Why Smart Leaders Fail.” KBRS, n.d. Web.

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Watkins, Michael D. The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

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Yeung, Ken. “Turnaround: Marissa Mayer’s first 300 days as Yahoo’s CEO.” The Next Web, 19 May 2013. Web.

Build Your Data Quality Program

Quality Data Drives Quality Business Decisions

Executive Brief

Analyst Perspective

Get ahead of the data curve by conquering data quality challenges.

Regardless of the driving business strategy or focus, organizations are turning to data to leverage key insights and help improve the organization’s ability to realize its vision, key goals, and objectives.

Poor quality data, however, can negatively affect time-to-insight and can undermine an organization’s customer experience efforts, product or service innovation, operational efficiency, or risk and compliance management. If you are looking to draw insights from your data for decision making, the quality of those insights is only as good as the quality of the data feeding or fueling them.

Improving data quality means having a data quality management practice that is sustainably successful and appropriate to the use of the data, while evolving to keep pace with or get ahead of changing business and data landscapes. It is not a matter of fixing one data set at a time, which is resource and time intensive, but instead identifying where data quality consistently goes off the rails, and creating a program to improve the data processes at the source.

Crystal Singh

Research Director, Data and Analytics

Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Your organization is experiencing the pitfalls of poor data quality, including:

• Unreliable data and unfavorable output.
• Inefficiencies and costly remedies.
• Dissatisfied stakeholders.

Poor data quality hinders successful decision making.

Common Obstacles

Not understanding the purpose and execution of data quality causes some disorientation with your data.

• Failure to realize the importance/value of data quality.
• Unsure of where to start with data quality.
• Lack of investment in data quality.

Organizations tend to adopt a project mentality when it comes to data quality instead of taking the strategic approach that would be all-around more beneficial in the long term.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Address the root causes of your data quality issues by forming a viable data quality program.

• Be familiar with your organization’s data environment and business landscape.
• Prioritize business use cases for data quality fixes.
• Fixing data quality issues at the root cause to ensure a proper foundation for your data to flow.

It is important to sustain best practices and grow your data quality program.

Info-Tech Insight

Fix data quality issues as close as possible to the source of data while understanding that business use cases will each have different requirements and expectations from data quality.

Data is the foundation of your organization’s knowledge

Data enables your organization to make decisions.

Reliable data is needed to facilitate data consumers at all levels of the enterprise.

Insights, knowledge, and information are needed to inform operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making processes. Data and information are needed to manage the business and empower business processes such as billing, customer touchpoints, and fulfillment.

Raw Data

Business Information

Actionable Insights

Data should be at the foundation of your organization’s evolution. The transformational insights that executives are constantly seeking can be uncovered with a data quality practice that makes high-quality, trustworthy information readily available to the business users who need it.

98% of companies use data to improve customer experience. (Experian Data Quality, 2019)

High-Level Data Architecture

Build Your Data Quality Program

1. Data Quality & Data Culture Diagnostics Business Landscape Exercise
2. Business Strategy & Use Cases
3. Prioritize Use Cases With Poor Quality

Info-Tech Insight

As data is ingested, integrated, and maintained in the various streams of the organization's system and application architecture, there are multiple points where the quality of the data can degrade.

1. Understand the organization's data culture and data quality environment across the business landscape.
2. Prioritize business use cases with poor data quality.
3. For each use case, identify data quality issues and requirements throughout the data pipeline.
4. Fix data quality issues at the root cause.
5. As data flow through quality assurance monitoring checkpoints, monitor data to ensure good quality output.

Insight:

Proper application of data quality dimensions throughout the data pipeline will result in superior business decisions.

Data quality issues can occur at any stage of the data flow.

Prevent the domino effect of poor data quality

Data is the foundation of decisions made at data-driven organizations.

Therefore, if there are problems with the organization’s underlying data, this can have a domino effect on many downstream business functions.

Let’s use an example to illustrate the domino effect of poor data quality.

Organization X is looking to migrate their data to a single platform, System Y. After the migration, it has become apparent that reports generated from this platform are inconsistent and often seem wrong. What is the effect of this?

1. Time must be spent on identifying the data quality issues, and often manual data quality fixes are employed. This will extend the time to deliver the project that depends on system Y by X months.
2. To repair these issues, the business needs to contract two additional resources to complete the unforeseen work. The new resources cost $X each, as well as additional infrastructure and hardware costs.
3. Now, the strategic objectives of the business are at risk and there is a feeling of mistrust in the new system Y.

Three key challenges impacting the ability to deliver excellent customer experience

30% Poor data quality

30% Method of interaction changing

30% Legacy systems or lack of new technology

95% Of organizations indicated that poor data quality undermines business performance.

(Source: Experian Data Quality, 2019)

Maintaining quality data will support more informed decisions and strategic insight

Improving your organization’s data quality will help the business realize the following benefits:

Data-Driven Decision Making

Business decisions should be made with a strong rationale. Data can provide insight into key business questions, such as, “How can I provide better customer satisfaction?”

89% Of CIOs surveyed say lack of quality data is an obstacle to good decision making. (Larry Dignan, CIOs juggling digital transformation pace, bad data, cloud lock0in and business alignment, 2020)

Customer Intimacy

Improve marketing and the customer experience by using the right data from the system of record to analyze complete customer views of transactions, sentiments, and interactions.

94% Percentage of senior IT leaders who say that poor data quality impinges business outcomes. (Clint Boulton, Disconnect between CIOs and LOB managers weakens data quality, 2016)

Innovation Leadership

Gain insights on your products, services, usage trends, industry directions, and competitor results to support decisions on innovations, new products, services, and pricing.

20% Businesses lose as much as 20% of revenue due to poor data quality. (RingLead Data Management Solutions, 10 Stats About Data Quality I Bet You Didn’t Know)

Operational Excellence

Make sure the right solution is delivered rapidly and consistently to the right parties for the right price and cost structure. Automate processes by using the right data to drive process improvements.

10-20% The implementation of data quality initiatives can lead to reductions in corporate budget of up to 20%. (HaloBI, 2015)

However, maintaining data quality is difficult

Avoid these pitfalls to get the true value out of your data.

1. Data debt drags down ROI – a high degree of data debt will hinder you from attaining the ROI you’re expecting.
2. Lack of trust means lack of usage – a lack of confidence in data results in a lack of data usage in your organization, which negatively effects strategic planning, KPIs, and business outcomes.
3. Strategic assets become a liability – bad data puts your business at risk of failing compliance standards, which could result in you paying millions in fines.
4. Increased costs and inefficiency – time spent fixing bad data means less workload capacity for your important initiatives and the inability to make data-based decisions.
5. Barrier to adopting data-driven tech – emerging technologies, such as predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, rely on quality data. Inaccurate, incomplete, or irrelevant data will result in delays or a lack of ROI.
6. Bad customer experience – Running your business on bad data can hinder your ability to deliver to your customers, growing their frustration, which negatively impacts your ability to maintain your customer base.

Info-Tech Insight

Data quality suffers most at the point of entry. This is one of the causes of the domino effect of data quality – and can be one of the most costly forms of data quality errors due to the error propagation. In other words, fix data ingestion, whether through improving your application and database design or improving your data ingestion policy, and you will fix a large majority of data quality issues.

Follow Our Data & Analytics Journey

Data Quality is laced into Data Strategy, Data Management, and Data Governance.

• Data Strategy
  • Data Management
    • Data Quality
    • Data Governance
      • Data Architecture
        • MDM
        • Data Integration
        • Enterprise Content Management
        • Information Lifecycle Management
          • Data Warehouse/Lake/Lakehouse
            • Reporting and Analytics
            • AI

Data quality is rooted in data management

Extract Maximum Benefit Out of Your Data Quality Management.

• Data management is the planning, execution, and oversight of policies, practices, and projects that acquire, control, protect, deliver, and enhance the value of data and information assets (DAMA, 2009).
• In other words, getting the right information, to the right people, at the right time.
• Data quality management exists within each of the data practices, information dimensions, business resources, and subject areas that comprise the data management framework.
• Within this framework, an effective data quality practice will replace ad hoc processes with standardized practices.
• An effective data quality practice cannot succeed without proper alignment and collaboration across this framework.
• Alignment ensures that the data quality practice is fit for purpose to the business.

The DAMA DMBOK2 Data Management Framework

• Data Governance
  • Data Quality
  • Data Architecture
  • Data Modeling & Design
  • Data Storage & Operations
  • Data Security
  • Data Integration & Interoperability
  • Documents & Content
  • Reference & Master Data
  • Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence
  • Meta-data

(Source: DAMA International)

Related Info-Tech Research

Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

• People often think that the main problems they need to fix first are related to data quality when the issues transpire at a much larger level. This blueprint is the key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

Create a Data Management Roadmap

• Refer to this blueprint to understand data quality in the context of data disciplines and methods for improving your data management capabilities.

Establish Data Governance

• Define an effective data governance strategy and ensure the strategy integrates well with data quality with this blueprint.

Info-Tech’s methodology for Data Quality

Info-Tech Insight

“Data Quality is in the eyes of the beholder.”– Igor Ikonnikov, Research Director

Data quality means tolerance, not perfection

Data from Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision Diagnostic, which represents over 400 business stakeholders, shows that data quality is very important when satisfaction with data quality is low.

However, when data quality satisfaction hit a threshold, it became less important.

Respondents were asked “How satisfied are you with the quality, reliability, and effectiveness of the data you use to manage your group?” as well as to rank how important data quality was to their organization.

When the business satisfaction of data quality reached a threshold value of 71-80%, the rated importance reached its lowest value.

Info-Tech Insight

Data needs to be good, but truly spectacular data may go unnoticed.

Provide the right level of data quality, with the appropriate effort, for the correct usage. This blueprint will help you to determine what “the right level of data quality” means, as well as create a plan to achieve that goal for the business.

Data Roles and Responsibilities

Data quality occurs through three main layers across the data lifecycle

Executive Brief Case Study

Industry: Healthcare

Source: Primary Info-Tech Research

Align source systems to maximize business output.

A healthcare insurance agency faced data quality issues in which a key business use case was impacted negatively. Business rules were not well defined, and default values instead of real value caused a concern. When dealing with multiple addresses, data was coming from different source systems.

The challenge was to identify the most accurate address, as some were incomplete, and some lacked currency and were not up to date. This especially challenged a key business unit, marketing, to derive business value in performing key activities by being unable to reach out to existing customers to advertise any additional products.

For this initiative, this insurance agency took an economic approach by addressing those data quality issues using internal resources.

Results

Without having any MDM tools or having a master record or any specific technology relating to data quality, this insurance agency used in-house development to tackle those particular issues at the source system. Data quality capabilities such as data profiling were used to uncover those issues and address them.

“Data quality is subjective; you have to be selective in terms of targeting the data that matters the most. When getting business tools right, most issues will be fixed and lead to achieving the most value.” – Asif Mumtaz, Data & Solution Architect

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostic and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between eight to twelve calls over the course of four to six months.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Phase 1

Define Your Organization’s Data Environment and Business Landscape

Build Your Data Quality Program

Data quality is a methodology and must be treated as such

A comprehensive data quality practice includes appropriate business requirements gathering, planning, governance, and oversight capabilities, as well as empowering technologies for properly trained staff, and ongoing development processes.

Some common examples of appropriate data management methodologies for data quality are:

• The data quality team has the necessary competencies and resources to perform the outlined workload.
• There are processes that exist for continuously evaluating data quality performance capabilities.
• Improvement strategies are designed to increase data quality performance capabilities.
• Policies and procedures that govern data quality are well-documented, communicated, followed, and updated.
• Change controls exist for revising policies and procedures, including communication of updates and changes.
• Self-auditing techniques are used to ensure business-IT alignment when designing or recalibrating strategies.

Effective data quality practices coordinate with other overarching data disciplines, related data practices, and strategic business objectives.

“You don’t solve data quality with a Band-Aid; you solve it with a methodology.” – Diraj Goel, Growth Advisor, BC Tech

Data quality can be defined by four key quality indicators

Similar to measuring the acidity of a substance with a litmus test, the quality of your data can be measured using a simple indicator test. As you learn about common root causes of data quality problems in the following slides, think about these four quality indicators to assess the quality of your data:

• Completeness – Closeness to the correct value. Encompasses accuracy, consistency, and comparability to other databases.
• Usability – The degree to which data meets current user needs. To measure this, you must determine if the user is satisfied with the data they are using to complete their business functions.
• Timeliness – Length of time between creation and availability of data.
• Accessibility – How easily a user can access and understand the data (including data definitions and context). Interpretability can also be used to describe this indicator.

Info-Tech Insight

Quality is a relative term. Data quality is measured in terms of tolerance. Perfect data quality is both impossible and a waste of time and effort.

How to get investment for your data quality program

Follow these steps to convince leadership of the value of data quality:

“You have to level with people, you cannot just start talking with the language of data and expect them to understand when the other language is money and numbers.” – Izabela Edmunds, Information Architect at Mott MacDonald

1. Perform Phases 0 & 1 of this blueprint as this will offer value in carrying out the following steps.
2. Build credibility. Show them your understanding of data and how it aligns to the business.
3. Provide tangible evidence of how significant business use cases are impacted by poor quality data.
4. Present the ROI of fixing the data quality issues you have prioritized.
5. Explain how the data quality program will be established, implemented, and sustained.
6. Prove the importance of fixing data quality issues at the source and how it is the most efficient, effective, and cost-friendly solution.

Phase 1 deliverables

Each of these deliverables serve as inputs to detect key outcomes about your organization and to help complete this blueprint:

1. Data Culture Diagnostic

Use this report to understand where your organization lies across areas relating to data culture.

While the Quality & Trust area of the report might be most prevalent to this blueprint, this diagnostic may point out other areas demanding more attention.

Please speak to your account manager for access

2. Business Capability Map Template

Perform this process to understand the capabilities that enable specific value streams. The output of this deliverable is a high-level view of your organization’s defined business capabilities.

Download this tool

Info-Tech Insight

Understanding your data culture and business capabilities are foundational to starting the journey of data quality improvement.

Key deliverable:

3. Data Quality Diagnostic

The Data Quality Report is designed to help you understand, assess, and improve key organizational data quality issues. This is where respondents across various areas in the organization can assess Data Quality across various dimensions.

Download this tool

Data Quality Diagnostic Value

Prioritize business use cases with our data quality dimensions.

• Complete this diagnostic for each major business use case. The output from the Data Culture Diagnostic and the Business Capability Map should help you understand which use cases to address.
• Involve all key stakeholders involved in the business use case. There may be multiple business units involved in a single use case.
• Prioritize the business use cases that need the most attention pertaining to data quality by comparing the scores of the Importance and Confidence data quality dimensions.

If there are data elements that are considered of high importance and low confidence, then they must be prioritized.

Sample Scorecard

Poor data quality develops due to multiple root causes

After you get to know the properties of good quality data, understand the underlying causes of why those indicators can point to poor data quality.

If you notice that the usability, completeness, timeliness, or accessibility of the organization’s data is suffering, one or more of the following root causes are likely plaguing your data:

Common root causes of poor data quality, through the lens of Info-Tech’s Five-Tier Data Architecture:

These root causes of poor data quality are difficult to avoid, not only because they are often generated at an organization’s beginning stages, but also because change can be difficult. This means that the root causes are often propagated through stale or outdated business processes.

Data quality problems root cause #1:

Poor system or application design

Application design plays one of the largest roles in the quality of the organization’s data. The proper design of applications can prevent data quality issues that can snowball into larger issues downstream.

Proper ingestion is 90% of the battle. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is true in many different topics, and data quality is one of them. Designing an application so that data gets entered properly, whether by internal staff or external customers, is the single most effective way to prevent data quality issues.

Some common causes of data quality problems at the application/system level include:

• Too many open fields (free-form text fields that accept a variety of inputs).
• There are no lookup capabilities present. Reference data should be looked up instead of entered.
• Mandatory fields are not defined, resulting in blank fields.
• No validation of data entries before writing to the underlying database.
• Manual data entry encourages human error. This can be compounded by poor application design that facilitates the incorrect data entry.

Data quality problems root cause #2:

Poor database design

Database design also affects data quality. How a database is designed to handle incoming data, including the schema and key identification, can impact the integrity of the data used for reporting and analytics.

The most common type of database is the relational database. Therefore, we will focus on this type of database.

When working with and designing relational databases, there are some important concepts that must be considered.

Referential integrity is a term that is important for the design of relational database schema, and indicates that table relationships must always be consistent.

For table relationships to be consistent, primary keys (unique value for each row) must uniquely identify entities in columns of the table. Foreign keys (field that is defined in a second table but refers to the primary key in the first table) must agree with the primary key that is referenced by the foreign key. To maintain referential integrity, any updates must be propagated to the primary parent key.

Info-Tech Insight

Other types of databases, including databases with unstructured data, need data quality consideration. However, unstructured data may have different levels of quality tolerance.

At the database level, some common root causes include:

1. Lack of referential integrity.
2. Lack of unique keys.
3. Don’t have restricted data range.
4. Incorrect datatype, string fields that can hold too many characters.
5. Orphaned records.

Databases and People:

Even though database design is a technology issue, don’t forget about the people.

A lack of training employees on database permissions for updating/entering data into the physical databases is a common problem for data quality.

Data quality problems root cause #3:

Improper integration and synchronization of enterprise data

Data ingestion is another category of data-quality-issue root causes. When moving data in Tier 2, whether it is through ETL, ESB, point-to-point integration, etc., the integrity of the data during movement and/or transformation needs to be maintained.

Tier 2 (the data ingestion layer) serves to move data for one of two main purposes:

• To move data from originating systems to downstream systems to support integrated business processes.
• To move data to Tier 3 where data rests for other purposes. This movement of data in its purest form means we move raw data to storage locations in an overall data warehouse environment reflecting any security, compliance and other standards in our choices for how to store. Also, it is where data is transformed for unique business purpose that will also be moved to a place of rest or a place of specific use. Data cleansing and matching and other data-related blending tasks occur at this layer.

This ensures the data is pristine throughout the process and improves trustworthiness of outcomes and speed to task completion.

At the integration layer, some common root causes of data quality problems include:

1. No data mask. For example, zip code should have a mask of five numeric characters.
2. Questionable aggregation, transformation process, or incorrect logic.
3. Unsynchronized data refresh process in an integrated environment.
4. Lack of a data matching tool.
5. Lack of a data quality tool.
6. Don’t have data profiling capability.
7. Errors with data conversion or migration processes – when migrating, decommissioning, or converting systems – movement of data sets.
8. Incorrect data mapping between data sources and targets.

Data quality problems root cause #4:

Insufficient and ineffective data quality policies and procedures

Data policies and procedures are necessary for establishing standards around data and represent another category of data-quality-issue root causes. This issue spans across all five of the 5 Tier Architecture.

Data policies are short statements that seek to manage the creation, acquisition, integrity, security, compliance, and quality of data. These policies vary amongst organizations, depending on your specific data needs.

• Policies describe what to do, while standards and procedures describe how to do something.
• There should be few data policies, and they should be brief and direct. Policies are living documents and should be continuously updated to respond to the organization’s data needs.
• The data policies should highlight who is responsible for the data under various scenarios and rules around how to manage it effectively.

Some common root causes of data quality issues related to policies and procedures include:

1. Policies are absent or out of date.
2. Employees are largely unaware of policies in effect.
3. Policies are unmonitored and unenforced.
4. Policies are in multiple locations.
5. Multiple versions of the same policy exist.
6. Policies are managed inconsistently across different silos.
7. Policies are written poorly by untrained authors.
8. Inadequate policy training program.
9. Draft policies stall and lose momentum.
10. Weak policy support from senior management.

Data quality problems root cause #5:

Inefficient or ineffective business processes

Some common root causes of data quality issues related to business processes include:

1. Multiple entries of the same record leads to duplicate records proliferating in the database.
2. Many business definitions of data.
3. Failure to document data manipulations when presenting data.
4. Failure to train people on how to understand data.
5. Manually intensive processes can result in duplication of effort (creates room for errors).
6. No clear delineation of dependencies of business processes within or between departments, which leads to a siloed approach to business processes, rather than a coordinated and aligned approach.

Business processes can impact data quality. How data is entered into systems, as well as employee training and knowledge about the correct data definitions, can impact the quality of your organization’s data.

These problematic business process root causes can lead to:

Duplicate records

Incomplete data

Improper use of data

Wrong data entered into fields

These data quality issues will result in costly and inefficient manual fixes, wasting valuable time and resources.

Phase 1 Summary

1. Data Quality Understanding

• Understanding that data quality is a methodology and should be treated as such.
• Data quality can be defined by four key indicators which are completeness, usability, timeliness, and accessibility.
• Explained how to get investment for your data quality program and showcasing its value to leadership.

2. Phase 0 Deliverables

Introduced foundational tools to help you throughout this blueprint:

• Complete the Data Culture Diagnostic and Business Capability Map Template as they are foundational in understanding your data culture and business capabilities to start the journey of data quality improvement.
• Involve key relevant stakeholders when completing the Data Quality Diagnostic for each major business use case. Use the Importance and Confidence dimensions to help you prioritize which use case to address.

3. Common Root Causes

Addressed where multiple root causes can occur throughout the flow of your data.

Analyzed the following common root causes of data quality:

1. Poor system or application design
2. Poor database design
3. Improper integration and synchronization of enterprise data
4. Insufficient and ineffective data quality policies and procedures
5. Inefficient or ineffective business processes

Phase 2

Analyze Your Priorities for Data Quality Fixes

Build Your Data Quality Program

Business Context & Data Quality

Establish the business context of data quality improvement projects at the business unit level to find common goals.

• To ensure the data improvement strategy is business driven, start your data quality project evaluation by understanding the business context. You will then determine which business units use data and create a roadmap for prioritizing business units for data quality repairs.
• Your business context is represented by your corporate business vision, mission, goals and objectives, differentiators, and drivers. Collectively, they provide essential information on what is important to your organization, and some hints on how to achieve that. In this step, you will gather important information about your business view and interpret the business view to establish a data view.

Business Vision

Business Goals

Business Drivers

Business Differentiators

Not every business unit uses data to the same extent

A data flow diagram can provide value by allowing an organization to adopt a proactive approach to data quality. Save time by knowing where the entry points are and where to look for data flaws.

Understanding where data lives can be challenging as it is often in motion and rarely resides in one place. There are multiple benefits that come from taking the time to create a data flow diagram.

• Mapping out the flow of data can help provide clarity on where the data lives and how it moves through the enterprise systems.
• Having a visual of where and when data moves helps to understand who is using data and how it is being manipulated at different points.
• A data flow diagram will allow you to elicit how data is used in a different use case.

Info-Tech’s Four-Column Model of Data will help you to identify the essential aspects of your data:

Business Use Case →Used by→Business Unit →Housed in→Systems→Used for→Usage of the Data

Not every business unit requires the same standard of data quality

To prioritize your business units for data quality improvement projects, you must analyze the relative importance of the data they use to the business. The more important the data is to the business, the higher the priority is of fixing that data. There are two measures for determining the importance of data: business value and business impact.

Business Value of Data

Business value of data can be evaluated by thinking about its ties to revenue generation for the organization, as well as how it is used for productivity and operations at the organization.

The business value of data is assessed by asking what would happen to the following parameters if the data is not usable (due to poor quality, for example):

• Loss of Revenue
• Loss of Productivity
• Increased Operating Costs

Business Impact of Data

Business impact of data should take into account the effects of poor data on both internal and external parties.

The business impact of data is assessed by asking what the impact would be of bad data on the following parameters:

• Impact on Customers
• Impact on Internal Staff
• Impact on Business Partners

Value + Impact = Data Priority Score

Ensure that the project starts on the right foot by completing Info-Tech’s Data Quality Problem Statement Template

Before you can identify a solution, you must identify the problem with the business unit’s data.

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Use Info-Tech’s Data Quality Problem Statement Template to identify the symptoms of poor data quality and articulate the problem.

Info-Tech’s Data Quality Problem Statement Template will walk you through a step-by-step approach to identifying and describing the problems that the business unit feels regarding its data quality.

Before articulating the problem, it helps to identify the symptoms of the problem. The following W’s will help you to describe the symptoms of the data quality issues:

What

Define the symptoms and feelings produced by poor data quality in the business unit.

Where

Define the location of the data that are causing data quality issues.

When

Define how severe the data quality issues are in frequency and duration.

Who

Define who is affected by the data quality problems and who works with the data.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Symptoms vs. Problems. Often, people will identify a list of symptoms of a problem and mistake those for the problem. Identifying the symptoms helps to define the problem, but symptoms do not help to identify the solution. The problem statement helps you to create solutions.

Define the project problem to articulate the purpose

1 hour

Input

• Symptoms of data quality issues in the business unit

Output

• Refined problem description

Materials

• Data Quality Problem Statement Template

Participants

• Data Quality Improvement Project team
• Business line representatives

A defined problem helps you to create clear goals, as well as lead your thinking to determine solutions to the problem.

A problem statement consists of one or two sentences that summarize a condition or issue that a quality improvement team is meant to address. For the improvement team to fix the problem, the problem statement therefore has to be specific and concise.

Instructions

1. Gather the Data Quality Improvement Project Team in a room and start with an issue that is believed to be related to data quality.
2. Ask what are the attributes and symptoms of that reality today; do this with the people impacted by the issue. This should be an IT and business collaboration.
3. Draw your conclusions of what it all means: what have you collectively learned?
4. Consider the implications of your conclusions and other considerations that must be taken into account such as regulatory needs, compliance, policy, and targets.
5. Develop solutions – Contain the problem to something that can be solved in a realistic timeframe, such as three months.

Download the Data Quality Problem Statement Template

Case Study

A strategic roadmap rooted in business requirements primes a data quality improvement plan for success.

MathWorks

Industry

Software Development

Source

Primary Info-Tech Research

As part of moving to a formalized data quality practice, MathWorks leveraged an incremental approach that took its time investigating business cases to support improvement actions. Establishing realistic goals for improvement in the form of a roadmap was a central component for gaining executive approval to push the project forward.

Roadmap Creation

In constructing a comprehensive roadmap that incorporated findings from business process and data analyses, MathWorks opted to document five-year and three-year overall goals, with one-year objectives that supported each goal. This approach ensured that the tactical actions taken were directed by long-term strategic objectives.

Results – Business Alignment

In presenting their roadmap for executive approval, MathWorks placed emphasis on communicating the progression and impact of their initiatives in terms that would engage business users. They focused on maintaining continual lines of communication with business stakeholders to demonstrate the value of the initiatives and also to gradually shift the corporate culture to one that is invested in an effective data quality practice.

“Don’t jump at the first opportunity, because you may be putting out a fire with a cup of water where a fire truck is needed.” – Executive Advisor, IT Research and Advisory Firm

Use Info-Tech’s Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool to create your strategy for improving data quality

Assess IT’s capabilities and competencies around data quality and plan to build these as the organization’s data quality practice develops. Before you can fix data quality, make sure you have the necessary skills and abilities to fix data quality correctly.

The following IT capabilities are developed on an ongoing basis and are necessary for standardizing and structuring a data quality practice:

• Meeting Business Needs
• Services and Projects
• Policies, Procedures, and Standards
• Roles and Organizational Structure
• Oversight and Communication
• Data Quality of Different Data Types

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Data Handling and Remediation Competencies:

• Data Standardization: Formatting values into consistent standards based on industry standards and business rules.
• Data Cleansing: Modification of values to meet domain restrictions, integrity constraints, or other business rules for sufficient data quality for the organization.
• Data Matching: Identification, linking, and merging related entries in or across sets of data.
• Data Validation: Checking for correctness of the data.

After these capabilities and competencies are assessed for a current and desired target state, the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool will suggest improvement actions that should be followed in order to build your data quality practice. In addition, a roadmap will be generated after target dates are set to create your data quality practice development strategy.

Benchmark current and identify target capabilities for your data quality practice

1 hour

Input

• Current and desired data quality practices in the organization

Output

• Assessment of where the gaps lie in your data quality practice

Materials

• Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool

Participants

• Data Quality Project Lead
• Business Line Representatives
• Business Architects

Use the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool to evaluate the baseline and target capabilities of your practice in terms of how data quality is approached and executed.

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Instructions

1. Invite the appropriate stakeholders to participate in this exercise. Examples:
   1. Business executives will have input in Tab 2
   2. Unique stakeholders: communications expert or executive advisors may have input
2. On Tab 2: Practice Components, assess the current and target states of each capability on a scale of 1–5. Note: “Ad hoc” implies a capability is completed, but randomly, informally, and without a standardized method.

These results will set the baseline against which you will monitor performance progress and keep track of improvements over time.

Info-Tech Insight

Focus on early alignment. Assessing capabilities within specific people’s job functions can naturally result in disagreement or debate, especially between business and IT people. Remind everyone that data quality should ultimately serve business needs wherever possible.

Visualization improves the holistic understanding of where gaps exist in your data quality practice

To enable deeper analysis on the results of your practice assessment, Tab 3: Data Quality Practice Scorecard in the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool creates visualizations of the gaps identified in each of your practice capabilities and related data management practices. These diagrams serve as analysis summaries.

Gap assessment of “Meeting Business Needs” capabilities

Visualization of gap assessment of data quality practice capabilities

1. Enhance your gap analyses by forming a relative comparison of total gaps in key practice capability areas, which will help in determining priorities.

• Example: In Tab 2 compare your capabilities within “Policies, Procedures, and Standards.” Then in Tab 3, compare your overall capabilities in “Policies, Procedures, and Standards” versus “Empowering Technologies.”

Before engaging in the data quality improvement project plan, receive signoff from IT regarding feasibility

The final piece of the puzzle is to gain sign-off from IT.

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

This means that before engaging IT in data quality projects to fix the business units’ data in Phase 2, IT must assess feasibility of the data quality improvement plan. A feasibility analysis is typically used to review the strengths and weaknesses of the projects, as well as the availability of required skills and technologies needed to complete them. Use the following workflow to guide you in performing a feasibility analysis:

Project evaluation process:

Present capabilities

• Operational Capabilities
• System Capabilities
• Schedule Capabilities
  • Summary of Evaluation Results
    • Recommendations/ modifications to the project plan

Info-Tech Best Practice

While the PMO identifies and coordinates projects, IT must determine how long and for how much.

Conduct gap analysis sessions to review and prioritize the capability gaps

1 hour

Input

• Current and Target State Assessment

Output

• Documented initiatives to help you get to the target state

Materials

• Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool

Participants

• Data Quality team
• IT representatives

Instructions

• Analyze Gap Analysis Results – As a group, discuss the high-level results on Tab 3: Data Quality Practice Score. Discuss the implications of the gaps identified.
• Do a line-item review of the gaps between current and target levels for each assessed capability by using Tab 2: Practice Components.
• Brainstorm Alignment Strategies – Brainstorm the effort and activities that will be necessary to support the practice in building its capabilities to the desired target level. Ask the following questions:
  • What activities must occur to enable this capability?
  • What changes/additions to resources, process, technology, business involvement, and communication must occur?
• Document Data Quality Initiatives – Turn activities into initiatives by documenting them in Tab 4. Data Quality Practice Roadmap. Review the initiatives and estimate the start and end dates of each one.
• Continue to evaluate the assessment results in order to create a comprehensive set of data quality initiatives that support your practice in building capabilities.

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Create the organization’s data quality improvement strategy roadmap

1 hour

Input

• Data quality practice gaps and improvement actions

Output

• Data quality practice improvement roadmap

Materials

• Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool

Participants

• Data Quality Project Lead
• Business Executives
• IT Executives
• Business Architects

Generating Your Roadmap

1. Plan the sequence, starting time, and length of each initiative in the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool.
2. The tool will generate a Gantt chart based on the start and length of your initiatives.
3. The Gantt chart is generated in Tab 4: Data Quality Practice Roadmap, and can be used to organize and ensure that all of the essential aspects of data quality are addressed.

Use the Practice Roadmap to plan and improve data quality capabilities

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Info-Tech Best Practice

To help get you started, Info-Tech has provided an extensive list of data quality improvement initiatives that are commonly undertaken by organizations looking to improve their data quality.

Establish Baseline Metrics

Baseline metrics will be improved through:

2 hours

Create practice-level metrics to monitor your data quality practice.

Instructions:

1. Establish metrics for both the business and IT that will be used to determine if the data quality practice development is effective.
2. Set targets for each metric.
3. Collect current data to calculate the metrics and establish a baseline.
4. Assign an owner for tracking each metric to be accountable for performance.

Phase 2 summary

As you improve your data quality practice and move from reactive to stable, don’t rest and assume that you can let data quality keep going by itself. Rapidly changing consumer requirements or other pains will catch up to your organization and you will fall behind again. By moving to the proactive and predictive end of the maturity scale, you can stay ahead of the curve. By following the methodology laid out in Phase 1, the data quality practices at your organization will improve over time, leading to the following results:

Chaotic

Before Data Quality Practice Improvements

• No standards to data quality

Reactive

Year 1

• Processes defined
• Data cleansing approach to data quality

Stable

Year 2

• Business rules/ stewardship in place
• Education and training

Proactive

Year 3

• Data quality practices fully in place and embedded in the culture
• Trusted and intelligent enterprise

(Global Data Excellence, Data Excellence Maturity Model)

Phase 3

Establish Your Organization’s Data Quality Program

Build Your Data Quality Program

Create a data lineage diagram to map the data journey and identify the data subject areas to be targeted for fixes

It is important to understand the various data that exist in the business unit, as well as which data are essential to business function and require the highest degree of quality efforts.

Visualize your databases and the flow of data. A data lineage diagram can help you and the Data Quality Improvement Team visualize where data issues lie. Keeping the five-tier architecture in mind, build your data lineage diagram.

Reminder: Five-Tier Architecture

Use the following icons to represent your various data systems and databases.

Use Info-Tech’s Data Lineage Diagram to document the data sources and applications used by the business unit

2 hours

Input

• Data sources and applications used by the business unit

Output

• Data lineage diagram

Materials

• Data Lineage Diagram Template

Participants

• Business Unit Head/Data Owner
• Business Unit SMEs
• Data Analysts/Architects

Map the flow and location of data within a business unit by creating a system context diagram.

Gain an accurate view of data locations and uses: Engage business users and representatives with a wide breadth of knowledge-related business processes and the use of data by related business operations.

1. Sit down with key business representatives of the business unit.
2. Document the sources of data and processes in which they’re involved, and get IT confirmation that the sources of the data are correct.
3. Map out the sources and processes in a system context diagram.

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Sample Data Lineage Diagram

Leverage Info-Tech’s Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool to document business context

1 hour

Input

• Business vision, goals, and drivers

Output

• Business context for the data quality improvement project

Materials

• Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool

Participants

• Data Quality project lead
• Business line representatives
• IT executives

Develop goals and align them with specific objectives to set the framework for your data quality initiatives.

In the context of achieving business vision, mission, goals, and objectives and sustaining differentiators and key drivers, think about where and how data quality is a barrier. Then brainstorm data quality improvement objectives that map to these barriers. Document your list of objectives in Tab 5. Prioritize business units of the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool.

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Document the identified business units and their associated data

30 minutes

Input

• Business units

Output

• Documented business units to begin prioritization

Materials

• Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool

Participants

• Project Manager

Instructions

1. Using Tab 5: Prioritize Business Units of the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool, document the business units that use data in the organization. This will likely be all business units in the organization.
2. Next, document the primary data used by those business units.
3. These inputs will then be used to assess business unit priority to generate a data quality improvement project roadmap.

Reminder – Not every business unit requires the same standard of data quality

To prioritize your business units for data quality improvement projects, you must analyze the relative importance of the data they use to the business. The more important the data is to the business, the higher the priority is of fixing that data. There are two measures for determining the importance of data: business value and business impact.

Business Value of Data

Business value of data can be evaluated by thinking about its ties to revenue generation for the organization, as well as how it is used for productivity and operations at the organization.

The business value of data is assessed by asking what would happen to the following parameters if the data is not usable (due to poor quality, for example):

• Loss of Revenue
• Loss of Productivity
• Increased Operating Costs

Business Impact of Data

Business impact of data should take into account the effects of poor data on both internal and external parties.

The business impact of data is assessed by asking what the impact would be of bad data on the following parameters:

• Impact on Customers
• Impact on Internal Staff
• Impact on Business Partners

Value + Impact = Data Priority Score

Assess the business unit priority order for data quality improvements

2 hours

Input

• Assessment of value and impact of business unit data

Output

• Prioritization list for data quality improvement projects

Materials

• Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool

Participants

• Project Manager
• Data owners

Instructions

Instructions In Tab 5: Prioritize Business Units of the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool, assess business value and business impact of the data within each documented business unit.

Use the ratings High, Medium, and Low to measure the financial, productivity, and efficiency value and impact of each business unit’s data.

In addition to these ratings, assess the number of help desk tickets that are submitted to IT regarding data quality issues. This parameter is an indicator that the business unit’s data is high priority for data quality fixes.

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Create a business unit order roadmap for your data quality improvement projects

1 hour

Input

• Rating of importance of data for each business unit

Output

• Roadmap for data quality improvement projects

Materials

• Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool

Participants

• Project Manager
• Product Manager
• Business line representatives

Instructions

After assessing the business units for the business value and business impact of their data, the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool automatically assesses the prioritization of the business units based on your ratings. These prioritizations are then summarized in a roadmap on Tab 6: Data Quality Project Roadmap. The following is an example of a project roadmap:

On Tab 6, insert the timeline for your data quality improvement projects, as well as the starting date of your first data quality project. The roadmap will automatically update with the chosen timing and dates.

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Identify metrics at the business unit level to track data quality improvements

As you improve the data quality for specific business units, measuring the benefits of data quality improvements will help you demonstrate the value of the projects to the business.

Use the following table to guide you in creating business-aligned metrics:

Info-Tech Insight

Relating data governance success metrics to overall business benefits keeps executive management and executive sponsors engaged because they are seeing actionable results. Review metrics on an ongoing basis with those data owners/stewards who are accountable, the data governance steering committee, and the executive sponsors.

Case Study

Address data quality with the right approach to maximize the ROI

EDC

Industry: Government

Source: Environment Development of Canada (EDC)

Challenge

Environment Development Canada (EDC) would initially identify data elements that are important to the business purely based on their business instinct.

Leadership attempted to tackle the enterprise’s data issues by bringing a set of different tools into the organization.

It didn’t work out because the fundamental foundational layer, which is the data and infrastructure, was not right – they didn't have the foundational capabilities to enable those tools.

Solution

Leadership listened to the need for one single team to be responsible for the data persistence.

Therefore, the data platform team was granted that mandate to extensively execute the data quality program across the enterprise.

A data quality team was formed under the Data & Analytics COE. They had the mandate to profile the data and to understand what quality of data needed to be achieved. They worked constantly with the business to build the data quality rules.

Results

EDC tackled the source of their data quality issues through initially performing a data quality management assessment with business stakeholders.

From then on, EDC was able to establish their data quality program and carry out other key initiatives that prove the ROI on data quality.

Begin your data quality improvement project starting with the highest priority business unit

Now that you have a prioritized list for your data quality improvement projects, identify the highest priority business unit. This is the business unit you will work through Phase 3 with to fix their data quality issues.

Once you have initiated and identified solutions for the first business unit, tackle data quality for the next business unit in the prioritized list.

Create and document your data quality improvement team

1 hour

Input

• Individuals who fit the data quality improvement plan team roles

Output

• Project team

Materials

• Data Quality Improvement Plan Template

Participants

• Data owner
• Project Manager
• Product Manager

The Data Quality Improvement Plan is a concise document that should be created for each data quality project (i.e. for each business unit) to keep track of the project.

Instructions

1. Meet with the data owner of the business unit identified for the data quality improvement project.
2. Identify individuals who fit the data quality improvement plan team roles.
3. Using the Data Quality Improvement Plan Template to document the roles and individuals who will fit those roles.
4. Have an introductory meeting with the Improvement team to clarify roles and responsibilities for the project.

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Document the business context of the Data Quality Improvement Plan

1 hour

Input

• Project team
• Identified data attributes

Output

• Business context for the data quality improvement plan

Materials

• Data Quality Improvement Plan Template

Participants

• Data owner
• Project Sponsor
• Product owner

Data quality initiatives have to be relevant to the business, and the business context will be used to provide inputs to the data improvement strategy. The context can then be used to determine exactly where the root causes of data quality issues are, which will inform your solutions.

Instructions

The business context of the data quality improvement plan includes documenting from previous activities:

1. The Data Quality Improvement Team.
2. Your Data Lineage Diagram.
3. Your Data Quality Problem Statement.

Info-Tech Best Practice

While many organizations adopt data quality principles, not all organizations express them along the same terms. Have multiple perspectives within your organization outline principles that fit your unique data quality agenda. Anyone interested in resolving the day-to-day data quality issues that they face can be helpful for creating the context around the project.

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Now that you have a defined problem, revisit the root causes of poor data quality

You previously fleshed out the problem with data quality present in the business unit chosen as highest priority. Now it is time to figure out what is causing those problems.

In the table below, you will find some of the common categories of causes of data quality issues, as well as some specific root causes.

Leverage a root cause analysis approach to pinpoint the origins of your data issues

A root cause analysis is a systematic approach to decompose a problem into its components. Use fishbone diagrams to help reveal the root causes of data issues.

Info-Tech recommends five root cause categories for assessing data quality issues:

Application Design. Is the issue caused by human error at the application level? Consider internal employees, external partners/suppliers, and customers.

Database Design. Is the issue caused by a particular database and stems from inadequacies in its design?

Integration. Data integration tools may not be fully leveraged, or data matching rules may be poorly designed.

Policies and Procedures. Do the issues take place because of lack of governance?

Business Processes. Do the issues take place due to insufficient processes?

For Example:

When performing a deeper analysis of your data issues related to the accuracy of the business unit’s data, you would perform a root cause analysis by assessing the contribution of each of the five categories of data quality problem root causes:

Leverage a combination of data analysis techniques to identify and quantify root causes

Info-Tech Insight

Including all attributes of the key subject area in your data profiling activities may produce too much information to make sense of. Conduct data profiling primarily at the table level and undergo attribute profiling only if you are able to narrow down your scope sufficiently.

Data Profiling Tool

Data profiling extracts a sample of the target data set and runs it through multiple levels of analysis. The end result is a detailed report of statistics about a variety of data quality criteria (duplicate data, incomplete data, stale data, etc.).

Many data profiling tools have built-in templates and reports to help you uncover data issues. In addition, they quantify the occurrences of the data issues.

E-Discovery Tool

This supplements a profiling tool. For Example, use a BI tool to create a custom grouping of all the invalid states (e.g. “CAL,” “AZN,” etc.) and visualize the percentage of invalid states compared to all states.

SQL Queries

This supplements a profiling tool. For example, use a SQL statement to group the customer data by customer segment and then by state to identify which segment–state combinations contain poor data.

Identify the data issues for the particular business unit under consideration

2 hours

Input

• Issues with data quality felt by the business unit
• Data lineage diagram

Output

• Categorized data quality issues

Materials

• Whiteboard, markers, sticky notes
• Data Quality Improvement Plan Template

Participants

• Data quality improvement project team
• Business line representatives

Instructions

1. Gather the data quality improvement project team in a room, along with sticky notes and a whiteboard.
2. Display your previously created data lineage diagram on the whiteboard.
3. Using color-coded sticky notes, attach issues to each component of the data lineage diagram that team members can identify. Use different colors for the four quality attributes: Completeness, Usability, Timeliness, and Accessibility.

Example:

Map the data issues on fishbone diagrams to identify root causes

1 hour

Input

• Categorized data quality issues

Output

• Completed fishbone diagrams

Materials

• Whiteboard, markers, sticky notes
• Data Quality Improvement Plan Template

Participants

• Data quality improvement project team

Now that you have data quality issues classified according to the data quality attributes, map these issues onto four fishbone diagrams.

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Get to know the root causes behind system/application design mistakes

Suboptimal system/application design provides entry points for bad data.

Get to know the root causes behind common database design mistakes

Improper database design allows incorrect data to be stored and propagated.

Get to know the root causes behind enterprise integration mistakes

Improper data integration or synchronization may create poor analytical data.

Get to know the root causes behind policy and procedure mistakes

Suboptimal policies and procedures undermine the effect of best practices.

Get to know the root causes behind common business process mistakes

Ineffective and inefficient business processes create entry points for poor data.

Phase 3 Summary

1. Data Lineage Diagram

• Creating the data lineage diagram is recommended to help visualize the flow of your data and to map the data journey and identify the data subject areas to be targeted for fixes.
• The data lineage diagram was leveraged multiple times throughout this Phase. For example, the data lineage diagram was used to document the data sources and applications used by the business unit

• Business context was documented through the Data Quality Practice Assessment and Project Planning Tool.
• The same tool was used to document identified business units and their associated data.
• Metrics were also identified at the business unit level to track data quality improvements.

Phase 4

Grow and Sustain Your Data Quality Program

Build Your Data Quality Program

For the identified root causes, determine the solutions for the problem

As you worked through the previous step, you identified the root causes of your data quality problems within the business unit. Now, it is time to identify solutions.

The following slides provide an overview of the solutions to common data quality issues. As you identify solutions that apply to the business unit being addressed, insert the solution tables in Section 4: Proposed Solutions of the Data Quality Improvement Plan Template.

All data quality solutions have two components to them:

• Technology
• People

For the next five data quality solution slides, look for the slider for the contributions of each category to the solution. Use this scale to guide you in creating solutions.

When designing solutions, keep in mind that solutions to data quality problems are not mutually exclusive. In other words, an identified root cause may have multiple solutions that apply to it.

For example, if an application is plagued with inaccurate data, the application design may be suboptimal, but also the process that leads to data being entered may need fixing.

Data quality improvement strategy #1:

Fix data quality issues by improving system/application design.

Technology

Application Interface Design

Restrict field length – Capture only the characters you need for your application.

Leverage data masks – Use data masks in standardized fields like zip code and phone number.

Restrict the use of open text fields and use reference tables – Only present open text fields when there is a need. Use reference tables to limit data values.

Provide options – Use radio buttons, drop-down lists, and multi-select instead of using open text fields.

Data Validation at the Application Level

Validate data before committing – Use simple validation to ensure the data entered is not random numbers and letters.

Track history – Keep track of who entered what fields.

Cannot submit twice – Only design for one-time submission.

People

Training

Data-entry training – Training that is related to data entry, creating, or updating data records.

Data resolution training – Training data stewards or other dedicated data personnel on how to resolve data records that are not entered properly.

Continuous Improvement

Standards – Develop application design principles and standards.

Field testing – Field data entry with a few people to look for abnormalities and discrepancies.

Detection and resolution – Abnormal data records should be isolated and resolved ASAP.

Application Testing

Thorough testing – Application design is your first line of defence against poor data. Test to ensure bad data is kept out of the systems.

Case Study

HMS

Industry: Healthcare

Source: Informatica

Improve your data quality ingestion procedures to provide better customer intimacy for your users

Healthcare Management Systems (HMS) provides cost containment services for healthcare sponsors and payers, and coordinates benefits services. This is to ensure that healthcare claims are paid correctly to both government agencies and individuals. To do so, HMS relies on data, and this data needs to be of high quality to ensure the correct decisions are made, the right people get the correct claims, and the appropriate parties pay out.

To improve the integrity of HMS’s customer data, HMS put in place a framework that helped to standardize the collection of high volume and highly variable data.

Results

Working with a data quality platform vendor to establish a framework for data standardization, HMS was able to streamline data analysis and reduce new customer implementations from months to weeks.

HMS data was plagued with a lack of standardization of data ingestion procedures.

Data quality improvement strategy #2:

Fix data quality issues using proper database design.

Technology

Database Design Best Practices

Referential integrity – Ensure parent/child relationships are maintained in terms of cascade creation, update, and deletion.

Primary key definition – Ensure there is at least one key to guarantee the uniqueness of the data records, and primary key should not allow null.

Validate data domain – Create triggers to check the data values entered in the database fields.

Field type and length – Define the most suitable data type and length to hold field values.

One-Time Data Fix (more on the next slide)

Explore solutions – Where to fix the data issues? Is there a case to fix the issues?

Running profiling tools to catch errors – Run scans on the database with defined criteria to identify occurrences of questionable data.

Fix a sample before fixing all records – Use a proof-of-concept approach to explore fix options and evaluate impacts before fixing the full set.

People

The DBA Team

Perform key tasks in pairs – Take a pair approach to perform key tasks so that validation and cross-check can happen.

Skilled DBAs – DBAs should be certified and accredited.

Competence – Assess DBA competency on an ongoing basis.

Preparedness – Develop drills to stimulate data issues and train DBAs.

Cross train – Cross train team members so that one DBA can cover another DBA.

Data quality improvement strategy #3:

Improve integration and synchronization of enterprise data.

Technology

Integration Architecture

Info-Tech’s 5-Tier Architecture – When doing transformations, it is good practice to persist the integration results in tier 3 before the data is further refined and presented in tier 4.

Timing, timing, and timing – Think of the sequence of events. You may need to perform some ETL tasks before other tasks to achieve synchronization and consistence.

Historical changes – Ensure your tier 3 is robust enough to include historical data. You need to enable type 2 slowly, changing dimension to recreate the data at a point in time.

Data Cleansing

Standardize – Leverage data standardization to standardize name and address fields to improve matching and integration.

Fuzzy matching – When there are no common keys between datasets. The datasets can only be matched by fuzzy matching. Fuzzy matching is not hard science; define a confidence level and think about a mechanism to deal with the unmatched.

People

Reporting and Documentations

Business data glossary and data lineage – Define a business data glossary to enhance findability of key data elements. Document data mappings and ETL logics.

Create data quality reports – Many ETL platforms provide canned data quality reports. Leverage those quality reports to monitor the data health.

Code Review

Create data quality reports – Many ETL platforms provide canned data quality reports. Leverage those quality reports to monitor the data health.

ARB (architectural review board) – All ETL codes should be approved by the architectural review board to ensure alignment with the overall integration strategy.

Data quality improvement strategy #4:

Improve data quality policies and procedures.

Technology

Policy Reporting

Data quality reports – Leverage canned data quality reports from the ETL platforms to monitor data quality on an on-going basis. When abnormalities are found, provoke the right policies to deal with the issues.

Store policies in a central location that is well known and easy to find and access. A key way that technology can help communicate policies is by having them published on a centralized website.

Make the repository searchable and easily navigable. myPolicies helps you do all this and more.

myPolicies helps you do all this and more.

Go to this link

People

Policy Review and Training

Policy review – Create a schedule for reviewing policies on a regular basis – invite professional writers to ensure polices are understandable.

Policy training – Policies are often unread and misread. Training users and stakeholders on policies is an effective way to make sure those users and stakeholders understand the rationale of the policies. It is also a good practice to include a few scenarios that are handled by the policies.

Policy hotline/mailbox – To avoid misinterpretation of the policies, a policy hotline/mailbox should be set up to answer any data policy questions from the end users/stakeholders.

Policy Communications

Simplified communications – Create handy one-pagers and infographic posters to communicate the key messages of the polices.

Policy briefing – Whenever a new data project is initiated, a briefing of data policies should be given to ensure the project team follows the policies from the very beginning.

Data quality improvement strategy #5:

Streamline and optimize business processes.

Technology

Requirements Gathering

Data Lineage – Leverage a metadata management tool to construct and document data lineage for future reference.

Documentations Repository – It is a best practice to document key project information and share that knowledge across the project team and with the stakeholder. An improvement understanding of the project helps to identify data quality issues early on in the project.

“Automating creation of data would help data quality most. You have to look at existing processes and create data signatures. You can then derive data off those data codes.” – Patrick Bossey, Manager of Business Intelligence, Crawford and Company

People

Requirements Gathering

Info-Tech’s 4-Column Model – The datasets may exist but the business units do not have an effective way of communicating the quality needs. Use our four-column model and the eleven supporting questions to better understand the quality needs. See subsequent slides.

I don’t know what the data means so I think the quality is poor – It is not uncommon to see that the right data presented to the business but the business does not trust the data. They also do not understand the business logic done on the data. See our Business Data Glossary in subsequent slides.

Understand the business workflow – Know the business workflow to understand the manual steps associated with the workflow. You may find steps in which data is entered, manipulated, or consumed inappropriately.

“Do a shadow data exercise where you identify the human workflows of how data gets entered, and then you can identify where data entry can be automated.” – Diraj Goel, Growth Advisor, BC Tech

Brainstorm solutions to your data quality issues

4 hours

Input

• Data profiling results
• Preliminary root cause analyses

Output

• Proposals for data fix
• Fixed issues

Materials

• Data Quality Improvement Plan Template

Participants

• Business and Data Analysts
• Data experts and stewards

After walking through the best-practice solutions to data quality issues, propose solutions to fix your identified issues.

Instructions

1. Review Root Cause Analyses: Revisit the root cause analysis and data lineage diagram you have generated in Step 3.2. to understand the issues in greater details.
2. Characterize Each Issue: You may need to generate a data profiling report to characterize the issue. The report can be generated by using data quality suites, BI platforms, or even SQL statements.
3. Brainstorm the Solutions: As a group, discuss potential ways to fix the issue. You can tackle the issues by approaching from these areas:

X crossover with

4. Document and Communicate: Document the solutions to your data issues. You may need to reuse or refer to the solutions. Also brainstorm some ideas on how to communicate the results back to the business.

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Sustaining your data quality requires continuous oversight through a data governance practice

Quality data is the ultimate outcome of data governance and data quality management. Data governance enables data quality by providing the necessary oversight and controls for business processes in order to maintain data quality. There are three primary groups (at right) that are involved in a mature governance practice. Data quality should be tightly integrated with all of them.

Define an effective data governance strategy and ensure the strategy integrates well with data quality with Info-Tech’s Establish Data Governance blueprint.

Visit this link

Data Governance Council

This council establishes data management practices that span across the organization. This should be comprised of senior management or C-suite executives that can represent the various departments and lines of business within the organization. The data governance council can help to promote the value of data governance, facilitate a culture that nurtures data quality, and ensure that the goals of the data governance program are well aligned with business objectives.

Data Owners

Identifying the data owner role within an organization helps to create a greater degree of accountability for data issues. They often oversee how the data is being generated as well as how it is being consumed. Data owners come from the business side and have legal rights and defined control over a data set. They ensure data is available to the right people within the organization.

Data Stewards

Conflict can occur within an organization’s data governance program when a data steward’s role is confused with that of the steering committee’s role. Data stewards exist to enforce decisions made about data governance and data management. Data stewards are often business analysts or power users of a particular system/dataset. Where a data owner is primarily responsible for access, a data steward is responsible for the quality of a dataset.

Integrate the data quality management strategy with existing data governance committees

Ongoing and regular data quality management is the responsibility of the data governance bodies of the organization.

The oversight of ongoing data quality activities rests on the shoulders of the data governance committees that exist in the organization.

There is no one-size-fits-all data governance structure. However, most organizations follow a similar pattern when establishing committees, councils, and cross-functional groups. They strive to identify roles and responsibilities at a strategic, tactical, and operational level:

Create and update the organization’s Business Data Glossary to keep up with current data definitions

2 hours

Input

• Metrics and goals for data quality

Output

• Regularly scheduled data quality checkups

Materials

• Business Data Glossary Template
• Data Quality Dashboard

Participants

• Data steward

A crucial aspect of data quality and governance is the Business Data Glossary. The Business Data Glossary helps to align the terminology of the business with the organization’s data assets. It allows the people who interact with the data to quickly identify the applications, processes, and stewardship associated with it, which will enhance the accuracy and efficiency of searches for organization data definitions and attributes, enabling better access to the data. This will, in turn, enhance the quality of the organization’s data because it will be more accurate, relevant, and accessible.

Use the Business Data Glossary Template to document key aspects of the data, such as:

• Definition
• Source System
• Possible Values
• Data Steward
• Data Sensitivity
• Data Availability
• Batch or Live
• Retention

Data Element

• Mkt-Product
• Fin-Product

Info-Tech Insight

The Business Data Glossary ensures that the crucial data that has key business use by key business systems and users is appropriately owned and defined. It also establishes rules that lead to proper data management and quality to be enforced by the data owners.

Download this Tool

Data Steward(s): Use the Data Quality Improvement Plan of the business unit for ongoing quality monitoring

Integrating your data quality strategy into the organization’s data governance program requires passing the strategy over to members of the data governance program. The data steward role is responsible for data quality at the business unit level, and should have been involved with the creation and implementation of the data quality improvement project. After the data quality repairs have been made, it is the responsibility of the data steward to regularly monitor the quality of the business unit’s data.

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See Info-Tech’s Data Steward Job Description Template for a detailed understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the data steward.

Responsible for sustaining

Develop a business-facing data quality dashboard to show improvements or a sudden dip in data quality

One tool that the data steward can take advantage of is the data quality dashboard. Initiatives that are implemented to address data quality must have metrics defined by business objectives in order to demonstrate the value of the data quality improvement projects. In addition, the data steward should have tools for tracking data quality in the business unit to report issues to the data owner and data governance steering committee.

• Example 1: Marketing uses data for direct mail and e-marketing campaigns. They care about customer data in particular. Specifically, they require high data quality in attributes such as customer name, address, and product profile.
• Example 2: Alternatively, Finance places emphasis on financial data, focusing on attributes like account balance, latency in payment, credit score, and billing date.

Notes on chart:

General improvement in billing address quality

Sudden drop in touchpoint accuracy may prompt business to ask for explanations

Approach to creating a business-facing data quality dashboard:

1. Schedule a meeting with the functional unit to discuss what key data quality metrics are essential to their business operations. You should consider the business context, functional area, and subject area analyses you completed in Phase 1 as a starting point.
2. Discuss how to gather data for the key metrics and their associated calculations.
3. Discuss and decide the reporting intervals.
4. Discuss and decide the unit of measurement.
5. Generate a dashboard similar to the example. Consider using a BI or analytics tool to develop the dashboard.

Data quality management must be sustained for ongoing improvements to the organization’s data

• Data quality is never truly complete; it is a set of ongoing processes and disciplines that requires a permanent plan for monitoring practices, reviewing processes, and maintaining consistent data standards.
• Setting the expectation to stakeholders that a long-term commitment is required to maintain quality data within the organization is critical to the success of the program.
• A data quality maintenance program will continually revise and fine-tune ongoing practices, processes, and procedures employed for organizational data management.

Data quality is a program that requires continual care:

→Maintain→Good Data →

Data quality management is a long-term commitment that shifts how an organization views, manages, and utilizes its corporate data assets. Long-term buy-in from all involved is critical.

“Data quality is a process. We are trying to constantly improve the quality over time. It is not a one-time fix.” – Akin Akinwumi, Manager of Data Governance, Startech.com

Define a data quality review agenda for data quality sustainment

2 hours

Input

• Metrics and goals for data quality

Output

• Regularly scheduled data quality checkups

Materials

• Data Quality Diagnostic
• Data Quality Dashboard

Participants

• Data Steward

As a data steward, you are responsible for ongoing data quality checks of the business unit’s data. Define an improvement agenda to organize the improvement activities. Organize the activities yearly and quarterly to ensure improvement is done year-round.

Quarterly

• Measure data quality metrics against milestones. Perform a regular data quality health check with Info-Tech’s Data Quality Diagnostic.
• Review the business unit’s Business Data Glossary to ensure that it is up to date and comprehensive.
• Assess progress of practice area initiatives (time, milestones, budget, benefits delivered).
• Analyze overall data quality and report progress on key improvement projects and corrective actions in the executive dashboard.
• Communicate overall status of data quality to oversight body.

Annually

• Calculate your current baseline and measure progress by comparing it to previous years.
• Set/revise quality objectives for each practice area and inter-practice hand-off processes.
• Re-evaluate/re-establish data quality objectives.
• Set/review data quality metrics and tracking mechanisms.
• Set data quality review milestones and timelines.
• Revisit data quality training from an end-user perspective and from a practitioner perspective.

Info-Tech Insight

Do data quality diagnostic at the beginning of any improvement plan, then recheck health with the diagnostic at regular intervals to see if symptoms are coming back. This should be a monitoring activity, not a data quality fixing activity. If symptoms are bad enough, repeat the improvement plan process.

Take the next step in your Data & Analytics Journey

After establishing your data quality program, look to increase your data & analytics maturity.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a concept that many organizations strive to implement. AI can really help in areas such as data preparation. However, implementing AI solutions requires a level of maturity that many organizations are not at.
• While a solid data quality foundation is essential for AI initiatives being successful, AI can also ensure high data quality.
• An AI analytics solution can address data integrity issues at the earliest point of data processing, rapidly transforming these vast volumes of data into trusted business information. This can be done through Anomaly detection, which flags “bad” data, identifying suspicious anomalies that can impact data quality. By tracking and evaluating data, anomaly detection gives critical insights into data quality as data is processed. (Ira Cohen, The End to a Never-Ending Story? Improve Data Quality with AI Analytics, anodot, 2020)

Consider… “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Lay a solid foundation by addressing your data quality issues prior to investing heavily in an AI solution.

Related Info-Tech Research

Are You Ready for AI?

• Use AI as a compelling event to expedite funding, resources, and project plans for your data-related initiatives. Check out this note to understand what it takes to be ready to implement AI solutions.

Get Started With Artificial Intelligence

• Current AI technology is data-enabled, automated, adaptive decision support. Once you believe you are ready for AI, check out this blueprint on how to get started.

Build a Data Architecture Roadmap

• The data lineage diagram was a key tool used in establishing your data quality program. Check out this blueprint and learn how to optimize your data architecture to provide greatest value from data.

Create an Architecture for AI

• Build your target state architecture from predefined best practice building blocks. This blueprint assists members first to assess if they have the maturity to embrace AI in their organization, and if so, which AI acquisition model fits them best.

Phase 4 Summary

1. Data Quality Improvement Strategy

• Brainstorm solutions to your data quality issues using the following data quality improvement strategies as a guide:
  1. Fix data quality issues by improving system/application design
  2. Fix data quality issues using proper database design
  3. Improve integration and synchronization of enterprise data
  4. Improve data quality policies and procedures
  5. Streamline and optimize business processes

• Quality data is the ultimate outcome of data governance and data quality management.
• Sustaining your data quality requires continuous oversight through a data governance practice.
• There are three primary groups (Data Governance Council, Data Owners, and Data Stewards) that are involved in a mature governance practice.

Research Contributors and Experts

Izabela Edmunds

Information Architect Mott MacDonald

Akin Akinwumi

Manager of Data Governance Startech.com

Diraj Goel

Growth Advisor BC Tech

Sujay Deb

Director of Data Analytics Technology and Platforms Export Development Canada

Asif Mumtaz

Data & Solution Architect Blue Cross Blue Shield Association

Patrick Bossey

Manager of Business Intelligence Crawford and Company

Anonymous Contributors

Ibrahim Abdel-Kader

Research Specialist Info-Tech Research Group

Ibrahim is a Research Specialist at Info-Tech Research Group. In his career to date he has assisted many clients using his knowledge in process design, knowledge management, SharePoint for ECM, and more. He is expanding his familiarity in many areas such as data and analytics, enterprise architecture, and CIO-related topics.

Reddy Doddipalli

Senior Workshop Director Info-Tech Research Group

Reddy is a Senior Workshop Director at Info-Tech Research Group, focused on data management and specialized analytics applications. He has over 25 years of strong industry experience in IT leading and managing analytics suite of solutions, enterprise data management, enterprise architecture, and artificial intelligence–based complex expert systems.

Andy Neill

Practice Lead, Data & Analytics and Enterprise Architecture Info-Tech Research Group

Andy leads the data and analytics and enterprise architecture practices at ITRG. He has over 15 years of experience in managing technical teams, information architecture, data modeling, and enterprise data strategy. He is an expert in enterprise data architecture, data integration, data standards, data strategy, big data, and development of industry standard data models.

Crystal Singh

Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group

Crystal is a Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group. She brings a diverse and global perspective to her role, drawing from her professional experiences in various industries and locations. Prior to joining Info-Tech, Crystal led the Enterprise Data Services function at Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s leading telecommunications companies.

Igor Ikonnikov

Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group

Igor is a Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group. He has extensive experience in strategy formation and execution in the information management domain, including master data management, data governance, knowledge management, enterprise content management, big data, and analytics.

Andrea Malick

Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group

Andrea Malick is a Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group, focused on building best practices knowledge in the enterprise information management domain, with corporate and consulting leadership in enterprise architecture and content management (ECM).

Natalia Modjeska

Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group

Natalia Modjeska is a Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group. She advises members on topics related to AI, machine learning, advanced analytics, and data science, including ethics and governance. Natalia has over 15 years of experience in developing, selling, and implementing analytical solutions.

Rajesh Parab

Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group

Rajesh Parab is a Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group. He has over 20 years of global experience and brings a unique mix of technology and business acumen. He has worked on many data-driven business applications. In his previous architecture roles, Rajesh created a number of product roadmaps, technology strategies, and models.

Bibliography

Amidon, Kirk. "Case Study: How Data Quality Has Evolved at MathWorks." The Fifth MIT Information Quality Industry Symposium. 13 July 2011. Web. 19 Aug. 2015.

Boulton, Clint. “Disconnect between CIOs and LOB managers weakens data quality.” CIO. 05 February 2016. Accessed June 2020.

COBIT 5: Enabling Information. Rolling Meadows, IL: ISACA, 2013. Web.

Cohen, Ira. “The End to a Never-Ending Story? Improve Data Quality with AI Analytics.” anodot. 2020.

“DAMA Guide to the Data Management Body of Knowledge (DAMA-DMBOK Guide).” First Edition. DAMA International. 2009. Digital. April 2014.

"Data Profiling: Underpinning Data Quality Management." Pitney Bowes. Pitney Bowes - Group 1 Software, 2007. Web. 18 Aug. 2015.

Data.com. “Data.com Clean.” Salesforce. 2016. Web. 18 Aug. 2015.

“Dawn of the CDO." Experian Data Quality. 2015. Web. 18 Aug. 2015.

Demirkan, Haluk, and Bulent Dal. "Why Do So Many Analytics Projects Fail?" The Data Economy: Why Do so Many Analytics Projects Fail? Analytics Magazine. July-Aug. 2014. Web.

Dignan, Larry. “CIOs juggling digital transformation pace, bad data, cloud lock-in and business alignment.” ZDNet. 11 March 2020. Accessed July.

Dumbleton, Janani, and Derek Munro. "Global Data Quality Research - Discussion Paper 2015." Experian Data Quality. 2015. Web. 18 Aug. 2015.

Eckerson, Wayne W. "Data Quality and the Bottom Line - Achieving Business Success through a Commitment to High Quality Data." The Data Warehouse Institute. 2002. Web. 18 Aug. 2015.

“Infographic: Data Quality in BI the Costs and Benefits.” HaloBI. 2015 Web.

Lee, Y.W. and Strong, D.M. “Knowing-Why About Data Processes and Data Quality.” Journal of Management Information Systems. 2004.

“Making Data Quality a Way of Life.” Cognizant. 2014. Web. 18 Aug. 2015.

"Merck Serono Achieves Single Source of Truth with Comprehensive RIM Solutions." www.productlifegroup.com. ProductLife Group. 15 Apr. 2015. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.

Myers, Dan. “List of Conformed Dimensions of Data Quality.” Conformed Dimensions of Data Quality (CDDQ). 2019. Web.

Redman, Thomas C. “Make the Case for Better Data Quality.” Harvard Business Review. 24 Aug. 2012. Web. 19 Aug. 2015.

RingLead Data Management Solutions. “10 Stats About Data Quality I Bet You Didn’t Know.” RingLead. Accessed 7 July 2020.

Schwartzrock, Todd. "Chrysler's Data Quality Management Case Study." Online video clip. YouTube. 21 April. 2011. Web. 18 Aug. 2015

“Taking control in the digital age.” Experian Data Quality. Jan 2019. Web.

“The data-driven organization, a transformation in progress.” Experian Data Quality. 2020. Web.

"The Data Quality Benchmark Report." Experian Data Quality. Jan. 2015. Web. 18 Aug. 2015.

“The state of data quality.” Experian Data Quality. Sept. 2013. Web. 17 Aug. 2015.

Vincent, Lanny. “Differentiating Competence, Capability and Capacity.” Innovation Management Services. Web. June 2008.

“7 ways poor data quality is costing your business.” Experian Data Quality. July 2020. Web.

Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback

Drive up CSAT scores by asking the right questions and effectively responding to user feedback.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Collecting feedback is only half the equation.

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Asking your customers for feedback then doing nothing with it is worse than not asking for feedback at all. Your customers may end up more dissatisfied than they were before, if their opinion is sought out and then ignored. It’s valuable to collect feedback, but the true value for both IT and its customers comes from acting on that feedback and communicating those actions back to your users.

Traditional service desk metrics can be misleading

The watermelon effect

When a service desk appears to hit all its targets according to the metrics it tracks, but service delivery is poor and customer satisfaction is low, this is known as the “watermelon effect”. Service metrics appear green on the outside, but under the surface (unmeasured), they’re red because customers are dissatisfied.

Traditional SLAs and service desk metrics (such as time to respond, average resolution time, percentage of SLAs met) can help you understand service desk performance internally to prioritize your work and identify process improvements. However, they don’t tell you how customers perceive the service or how satisfied they are.

Providing good service to your customers should be your end goal. Failing to measure, monitor, and act on customer feedback means you don’t have the whole picture of how your service desk is performing and whether or where improvements are needed to maximize satisfaction.

There is a shift in ITSM to focus more on customer experience metrics over traditional ones

The Service Desk Institute (SDI) suggests that customer satisfaction is the most important indicator of service desk success, and that traditional metrics around SLA targets – currently the most common way to measure service desk performance – may become less valuable or even obsolete in the future as customer experience-focused targets become more popular. (Service Desk Institute, 2021)

SDI conducted a Customer Experience survey of service desk professionals from a range of organizations, both public and private, from January to March 2018. The majority of respondents said that customer experience is more important than other metrics such as speed of service or adherence to SLAs, and that customer satisfaction is more valuable than traditional metrics. (SDI, 2018).

However, many service desk leaders aren’t effectively measuring customer feedback

Not only is it important to measure customer experience and satisfaction levels, but it’s equally important to act on that data and feed it into a service improvement program. However, many IT leaders are neglecting either one or both of those components.

A strong customer feedback program brings many benefits to IT and the business

Take Action on Service Desk Customer Feedback

Info-Tech’s methodology for measuring and acting on service desk customer feedback

Insight Summary

Key Insight:

Asking your customers for feedback then doing nothing with it is worse than not asking for feedback at all. Your customers may end up more dissatisfied than they were before if they’re asked for their opinion then see nothing done with it. It’s valuable to collect feedback, but the true value for both IT and its customers comes from acting on that feedback and communicating those actions back to your users.

Additional insights:

Understand how to measure customer satisfaction

Phase 1

Understand the main types of customer satisfaction surveys, principles for survey design, and best practices for surveying your users.

Three methods of surveying your customers

Pros and cons of the three methods

Which survey method should you choose?

Only relying on one type of survey will leave gaps in your understanding of customer satisfaction. Include both transactional and relationship surveys to provide a holistic picture of customer satisfaction with the service desk.

If you can only start with one type, choose the type that best aligns with your goals and priorities:

Info-Tech Insight

One-off surveys can be useful to assess whether a specific change has impacted satisfaction, or to inform a planned change/initiative. However, as they aren’t typically part of an on-going customer feedback program, the focus of this research will be on transactional and relationship surveys.

3 common customer satisfaction measures

The three most utilized measures of customer satisfaction include CSAT, CES, and NPS.

When to use each satisfaction measure

How to choose which measure(s) to incorporate in your surveys

The best measures are the ones that align with your specific goals for collecting feedback.

• Most companies will use multiple satisfaction measures. For example, NPS can be tracked to monitor the overall customer sentiment, and CSAT used for more targeted feedback.
• For internal-facing IT departments, CSAT is the most popular of the three methods, and NPS may not be as useful.
• Choose your measure and survey types based on what you are trying to achieve and what kind of information you need to make improvements.
• Remember that one measure alone isn’t going to give you actionable feedback; you’ll need to follow up with additional measures (especially for NPS and CES).
• For CSAT surveys, customize the satisfaction measures in as many ways as you need to target the questions toward the areas you’re most interested in.
• Don’t stick to just these three measures or types of surveys – there are other ways to collect feedback. Experiment to find what works for you.
• If you’re designing your own survey, keep in mind the principles on the next slide.

Info-Tech Insight

While we focus mainly on traditional survey-based approaches to measuring customer satisfaction in this blueprint, there’s no need to limit yourselves to surveys as your only method. Consider multiple techniques to capture a wider audience, including:

• Customer journey mapping
• Focus groups with stakeholders
• Lunch and learns or workshop sessions
• Interviews – phone, chat, in-person
• Kiosks

Principles for survey design

As you design your satisfaction survey – whether transactional or relational – follow these guidelines to ensure the survey delivers value and gets responses.

1. Focus on your goal

Don’t include unnecessary questions that won’t give you actionable information; it will only waste respondents’ time.

2. Be brief

Keep each question as short as possible and limit the total number of survey questions to avoid survey fatigue.

3. Include open-ended questions

Most of your measures will be close-ended, but include at least one comment box to allow for qualitative feedback.

4. Keep questions clear and concise

Ensure that question wording is clear and specific so that all respondents interpret it the same way.

5. Avoid biased or leading questions

You won’t get accurate results if your question leads respondents into thinking or answering a certain way.

6. Avoid double-barreled questions

Don’t ask about two different things in the same question – it will confuse respondents and make your data hard to interpret.

7. Don’t restrict responses

Response options should include all possible opinions (including “don’t know”) to avoid frustrating respondents.

8. Make the survey easy to complete

Pre-populate information where possible (e.g. name, department) and ensure the survey is responsive on mobile devices.

9. Keep questions optional

If every question is mandatory, respondents may leave the survey altogether if they can’t or don’t want to answer one question.

10. Test your survey

Test your survey with your target audience before launching, and incorporate feedback - they may catch issues you didn’t notice.

Prevent survey fatigue to increase response rates

If it takes too much time or effort to complete your survey – whether transactional or relational – your respondents won’t bother. Balance your need to collect relevant data with users’ needs for a simple and worthwhile task in order to get the most value out of your surveys.

There are two types of survey fatigue:

1. Survey response fatigue

Occurs when users are overwhelmed by too many requests for feedback and stop responding.

2. Survey taking fatigue

Occurs when the survey is too long or irrelevant to users, so they grow tired and abandon the survey.

Fight survey fatigue:

• Make it as easy as possible to answer your survey:
  • Keep the survey as short as possible.
  • For transactional surveys, allow respondents to answer directly from email without having to click a separate link if possible.
  • Don’t make all questions mandatory or users may abandon it if they get to a difficult or unapplicable question.
  • Test the survey experience across devices for mobile users.
• Communicate the survey’s value so users will be more likely to donate their time.
• Act on feedback: follow up on both positive and negative responses so users see the value in responding.
• Consider attaching an incentive to responding (e.g. name entered in a monthly draw).

Design and implement transactional surveys

Phase 2

Learn why and how to design a simple survey to assess satisfaction with individual service desk transactions (tickets) and a methodology for survey delivery that will improve response rates.

Use transactional surveys to collect immediate and actionable feedback

Recall the definition of a transactional survey:

• Survey that is tied to a specific customer interaction with the service desk (i.e. a ticket).
• Assesses how satisfied customers are with how the ticket was handled and resolved.
• Sent immediately after ticket is closed.
• Short – usually 1 to 3 questions.

Info-Tech Insight

While feedback on transactional surveys is specific to a single transaction, even one negative experience can impact the overall perception of the service desk. Pair your transactional surveys with an annual relationship survey to capture broader sentiment toward the service desk.

Transactional surveys serve several purposes:

• Gives end users a mechanism to provide feedback when they want to.
• Provides continual insight into customer satisfaction throughout the year to monitor for trends or issues in between broader surveys.
• Provides IT leaders with actionable insights into areas for improvement in their processes, knowledge and skills, or customer service.
• Gives the service desk the opportunity to address any negative experiences or perceptions with customers, to repair the relationship.
• Feeds into individual or team coaching for service desk staff.

Make key decisions ahead of launching your transactional surveys

If you want to get the most of your surveys, you need to do more than just click a button to enable out-of-the-box surveys through your ITSM tool. Make these decisions ahead of time:

Key decisions, continued

Define the goals of your transactional survey program

Every survey should have a goal in mind to ensure only relevant and useful data is collected.

• Your survey program must be backed by clear and actionable goals that will inform all decisions about the survey.
• Survey questions should be structured around that goal, with every question serving a distinct purpose.
• If you don’t have a clear plan for how you will action the data from a particular question, exclude it.
• Don’t run a survey just for the sake of it; wait until you have a clear plan. If customers respond and then see nothing is done with the data, they will learn to avoid your surveys.

Your survey objectives will also determine how often to send the survey:

Info-Tech Insight

Service Managers often get caught up in running a transactional survey program because they think it’s standard practice, or they need to report a satisfaction metric. If that’s your only objective, you will fail to derive value from the data and will only turn customers away from responding.

Design survey content and length

As you design your survey, keep in mind the following principles:

1. Keep it short. Your customers won’t bother responding if they see a survey with multiple questions or long questions that require a lot of reading, effort, or time.
2. Make it simple. This not only makes it easier for your customers to complete, but easier for you to track and monitor.
3. Tie your survey to your goals. Remember that every question should have a clear and actionable purpose.
4. Don’t measure anything you can’t control. If you won’t be able to make changes based on the feedback, there’s no value asking about it.
5. Include an (optional) open-ended question. This will allow customers to provide more detailed feedback or suggestions.

Q: How many questions should the survey contain?

A: Ideally, your survey will have only one mandatory question that captures overall satisfaction with the interaction.

This question can be followed up with an optional open-ended question prompting the respondent for more details. This will provide a lot more context to the overall rating.

If there are additional questions you need to ask based on your goals, clearly make these questions optional so they don’t deter respondents from completing the survey. For example, they can appear only after the respondent has submitted their overall satisfaction response (i.e. on a separate, thank you page).

Additional (optional) measures may include:

• Customer effort score (how easy or difficult was it to get your issue resolved?)
• Customer service skills of the service desk
• Technical skills/knowledge of the agents
• Speed or response or resolution

Design question wording

Tips for writing survey questions:

• Be clear and concise
• Keep questions as short as possible
• Cut out any unnecessary words or phrasing
• Avoid biasing, or leading respondents to select a certain answer
• Don’t attempt to measure multiple constructs in a single question.

Sample question wording:

How satisfied are you with this support experience?

How would you rate your support experience?

Please rate your overall satisfaction with the way your issue was handled.

Choose response options

Once you’ve written your survey question, you need to design the response options for the question. Put careful thought into balancing ease of responding for the user with what will give you the actionable data you need to meet your goals. Keep the following in mind:

Decide how often to send surveys

There are two common choices for when to send ticket satisfaction surveys:

SDI’s 2018 Customer Experience in ITSM survey of service desk professionals found:

Almost two-thirds (65%) send surveys after every ticket.

One-third (33%) send surveys after randomly selected tickets are closed.

Info-Tech Recommendation:

Send a survey after every ticket so that anyone who has feedback gets the opportunity to provide it – and you always get the chance to act on negative feedback. But, limit how often any one customer receives a ticket to avoid over-surveying them – restrict to anywhere between one survey a week to one per month per customer.

Plan detailed survey logistics

Plan detailed survey logistics

Plan detailed survey logistics

Plan detailed survey logistics

Response rates for transactional surveys are typically low…

Most IT organizations see transactional survey response rates of less than 20%.

… but there are steps you can take to maximize your response rate

It is still difficult to achieve high response rates to transactional surveys, but you can at least increase your response rate with these strategies:

1. Reduce frequency

Don’t over-survey any one user or they will start to ignore the surveys.

2. Send immediately

Ask for feedback soon after the ticket was resolved so it’s fresh in the user’s memory.

3. Make it short and simple

Keep the survey short, concise, and simple to respond to.

4. Make it easy to complete

Minimize effort involved as much as possible. Allow users to respond directly from email and from any device.

5. Change email messaging

Experiment with your subject line or email messaging to draw more attention.

6. Respond to feedback

Respond to customers who provide feedback – especially negative – so they know you’re listening.

7. Act on feedback

Demonstrate that you are acting on feedback so users see the value in responding.

Use Info-Tech’s survey template as a starting point

Once you’ve worked through all the decisions in this step, you’re ready to configure your transactional survey in your ITSM solution or survey tool.

As a starting point, you can leverage Info-Tech’s Transactional Service Desk Survey Templatee to design your templates and wording.

Make adjustments to match your decisions or your configuration limitations as needed.

Refer to the key decisions tables on slides 24 and 25 to ensure you’ve made all the configurations necessary as you set up your survey.

Design and implement relationship surveys

Phase 3

Understand why and how to design a survey to assess overall satisfaction with the service desk across your organization, or use Info-Tech’s diagnostic.

How can we evaluate overall Service Desk service quality?

Evaluating service quality in any industry is challenging for both those seeking feedback and those consuming the service: “service quality is more difficult for the consumer to evaluate than goods quality.”

You are in the position of trying to measure something intangible: customer perception, which “result[s] from a comparison of consumer expectations with actual service performance,” which includes both the service outcome and also “the process of service delivery”

(Source: Parasuraman et al, 1985, 42).

Your mission is to design a relationship survey that is:

• Comprehensive but not too long.
• Easy to understand but complex enough to capture enough detail.
• Able to capture satisfaction with both the outcome and the experience of receiving the service.

Use relationship surveys to measure overall service desk service quality

Recall the definition of a relationship survey:

• Survey that is sent periodically (i.e. semi-annually or annually) to the entire customer base to measure the overall relationship with the service desk.
• Shows you where your customer experience is doing well and where it needs improving.
• Asks customers to rate you based on their overall experience rather than on a specific product or interaction.
• Longer and more comprehensive than transactional surveys, covering multiple dimensions/ topics.

Relationship surveys serve several purposes:

• Gives end users an opportunity to provide overall feedback on a wider range of experiences with IT.
• Gives IT the opportunity to respond to feedback and show users their voices are heard.
• Provides insight into year-over-year trends and customer satisfaction.
• Provides IT leaders the opportunity to segment the results by demographic (e.g. by department, location, or seniority) and target improvements where needed most.
• Feeds into strategic planning and annual reports on user experience and satisfaction

Info-Tech Insight

Annual relationship surveys provide great value in the form of year-over-year internal benchmarking data, which you can use to track improvements and validate the impact of your service improvement efforts.

Understand the gaps that decrease service quality

The Service Quality Model (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985) shows how perceived service quality is negatively impacted by the gap between expectations for quality service and the perceptions of actual service delivery: Gap 1: Consumer expectation – Management perception gap: Are there differences between your assumptions about what users want from a service and what those users expect? Gap 2: Management perception – Service quality specification gap: Do you have challenges translating user expectations for service into standardized processes and guidelines that can meet those expectations? Gap 3: Service quality specifications – Service delivery gap: Do staff members struggle to carry out the service quality processes when delivering service? Gap 4: Service delivery – External communications gap: Have users been led to expect more than you can deliver? Alternatively, are users unaware of how the organization ensures quality service, and therefore unable to appreciate the quality of service they receive? Gap 5: Expected service – Perceived service gap: Is there a discrepancy between users’ expectations and their perception of the service they received (regardless of any user misunderstanding)?

Your survey questions about service and support should provide insight into where these gaps exist in your organization

Make key decisions ahead of launch

Align the relationship survey with your goals

What is motivating you to launch the survey at this time?

Is there a renewed focus on customer service satisfaction? If so, this survey will track the initiative’s success, so its questions must align with the sponsors’ expectations.

Are you surveying customer satisfaction in order to comply with legislation, or directives to measure customer service quality?

What objectives/outcomes will this survey feed into?

What do you need to report on to your stakeholders? Have they communicated any expectations regarding the data they expect to see?

Does the CIO want the annual survey to measure end-user satisfaction with all of IT?

• Or do you only want to measure satisfaction with one set of processes (e.g. Service Desk)?
• Are you seeking feedback on a project (e.g. implementation of new ERP)?
• Are you seeking feedback on the application portfolio?

In 1993 the U.S. president issued an Executive Order requiring executive agencies to “survey customers to determine the kind and quality of services they want and their level of satisfaction with existing services” and “post service standards and measure results against them.” (Clinton, 1993)

Identify what you’re measuring

Info-Tech Insight

As you compose survey questions, decide whether they are intended to capture user satisfaction or effort: this will influence how the question is worded. Include a mix of both.

Determine a framework for your survey

If your relationship survey covers satisfaction with service support, ensure the questions cover the major aspects of service quality. You may wish to align your questions on support with existing frameworks: for example, the SERVQUAL service quality measurement instrument identifies 5 dimensions of service quality: Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy, and Responsiveness (see below). As you design the survey, consider if the questions relate to these five dimensions. If you have overlooked any of the dimensions, consider if you need to revise or add questions.

1-5. Arlen, Chris,2022. Paraphrasing Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry, 1990.

Cover logistical details of the survey

Use the Sample Size Calculator to determine your ideal sample size

Info-Tech’s End-User Satisfaction Diagnostics

If you choose to leverage a third-party partner, an Info-Tech satisfaction survey may already be part of your membership. There are two options, depending on your needs:

Design question wording

Choose answer scales that best fit your questions and reporting needs

Likert scale

Respondents select from a range of statements the position with which they most agree:

E.g. How satisfied are you with how long it generally takes to resolve your issue completely?

E.g. Very dissatisfied/Somewhat dissatisfied/ Neutral/ Somewhat satisfied/ Very satisfied/ NA

Frequency scale

How often does the respondent have to do something, or how often do they encounter something?

E.g. How frequently do you need to re-open tickets that have been closed without being satisfactorily resolved?

E.g. Never/ Rarely/ Sometimes/ Often/ Always/ NA

Numeric scale

By asking users to rate their satisfaction on a numeric scale (e.g., 1-5, 1-10), you can facilitate reporting on averages:

E.g. How satisfied are you with IS’s ability to provide services to allow the organization to meet its goals?

E.g. 1 – Not at all Satisfied to 10 – Fully Satisfied / NA

Forced ranking

Learn more about your users’ priorities by asking them to rank answers from most to least important, or selecting their top choices (Sauro, 2018):

E.g. From the following list, drag and drop the 3 aspects of our service that are most important to you into the box on the right.

Info-Tech Insight

Always include an optional open-ended question, which allows customers to provide more feedback or suggestions.

Test the survey before launching

Review your questions for repetition and ask for feedback on your survey draft to discover if readers interpret the questions differently than you intended.

Test the survey with different stakeholder groups:

• IT staff: To discover overlooked topics.
• Representatives of your end-user population: To discover whether they understand the intention of the questions.
• Executives: To validate whether you are capturing the data they are interested in reporting on.

Testing methodology:

• Ask your test subjects to take the survey in your presence so you can monitor their experience as they take it.
• Ask them to narrate their experience as they take the survey.
• Watch for:
  • The time it takes to complete the survey.
  • Moments when they struggle or are uncertain with the survey’s wording.
  • Questions they find repetitive or pointless.

Info-Tech Insight

In the survey testing phase, try to capture at least a few real-time responses to the survey. If you collect survey feedback only once the test is over, you may miss some key insights into the user experience of navigating the survey.

“Follow the golden rule: think of your audience and what they may or may not know. Think about what kinds of outside pressures they may bring to the work you’re giving them. What time constraints do they have?”

– Sally Colwell, Project Officer, Government of Canada Pension Centre

Monitor and maximize your response rate

Ensure success by staying on top of the survey during the period it is open.

• When will your users complete the survey? You know your own organization’s culture best, but SurveyMonkey found that weekday survey responses peaked at mid-morning and mid-afternoon (Wronski). Ensure you send the communication at a time it will not be overlooked. For example, some studies found Mondays to have higher response rates; however, the data is not consistent (Amaresan, 2021). Send the survey at a time you believe your users are least likely to be inundated with other notifications.
• Have a trusted leader send out the first communication informing the end-user base of the survey. Ensure the recipient understands your motivation and how their responses will be used to benefit them (O’Reardon, 2016). Remind them that participating in the survey benefits them: since IT is taking actions based on their feedback, it’s their chance to improve their employee experience of the IT services and tools they use to do their job.
• In the introductory communication, test different email subject lines and email body content to learn which versions increase respondents’ rates of opening the survey link, and “keep it short and clear” (O’Reardon, 2016).
• If your users tend to mistrust emailed links due to security training, tell them how to confirm the legitimacy of the survey.

“[Send] one reminder to those who haven’t completed the survey after a few days. Don’t use the word ‘reminder’ because that’ll go straight in the bin, better to say something like, ‘Another chance to provide your feedback’”

– David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

Analyze and act on feedback

Phase 4

Measure and analyze the results of both surveys and build a plan to act on both positive and negative feedback and communicate the results with the organization.

Leverage the service recovery paradox to improve customer satisfaction

A service failure or a poor experience isn’t what determines customer satisfaction – it’s how you respond to the issue and take steps to fix it that really matters.

This means one poor experience with the service desk doesn’t necessarily lead to an unhappy user; if you quickly and effectively respond to negative feedback to repair the relationship, the customer may be even happier afterwards because you demonstrated that you value them.

“Every complaint becomes an opportunity to turn a bad IT customer experience into a great one.”

– David O’Reardon, Founder & CEO of Silversix

Collecting feedback is only the first step in the customer feedback loop

Closing the feedback loop is one of the most important yet forgotten steps in the process.

1. Collect Feedback

• Send transactional surveys after every ticket is resolved.
• Send a broader annual relationship survey to all users.

• Calculate satisfaction scores.
• Read open-ended comments.
• Analyze for trends, categories, common issues and priorities.

• Respond to users who provided feedback.
• Make improvements based on feedback.

• Communicate feedback results and improvements made to respondents and to service desk staff.
• Summarize results and actions to key stakeholders and business leaders.

Act on feedback to get the true value of your satisfaction program

SDI (2018) survey data shows that the majority of service desk professionals are using their customer satisfaction data to feed into service improvements. However, 30% still aren’t doing anything with the feedback they collect. Collecting feedback is only one half of a good customer feedback program. Acting on that feedback is critical to the success of the program. Using feedback to make improvements not only benefits the service desk but shows users the value of responding and will increase future response rates.

“Your IT service desk’s CSAT survey should be the means of improving your service (and the employee experience), and something that encourages people to provide even more feedback, not just the means for understanding how well it’s doing” – Joe the IT Guy, SysAid

Assign responsibility for acting on feedback

If collecting and analyzing customer feedback is something that happens off the side of your desk, it either won’t get done or won’t get done well.

• Formalize the customer satisfaction program. It’s not a one-time task, but an ongoing initiative that requires significant time and dedication.
• Be clear on who is accountable for the program and who is responsible for all the tasks involved for both transactional and relationship survey data collection, analysis, and communication.

Assign accountability for the customer feedback program to one person (i.e. Service Desk Manager, Service Manager, Infrastructure & Operations Lead, IT Director), who may take on or assign responsibilities such as:

• Designing surveys, including survey questions and response options.
• Configuring survey(s) in ITSM or survey tool.
• Sending relationship surveys and subsequent reminders to the organization.
• Communicating results of both surveys to internal staff, business leaders, and end users.
• Analyzing results.
• Feeding results into improvement plans, coaching, and training.
• Creating reports and dashboards to monitor scores and trends.

Info-Tech Insight

While feedback can feed into internal coaching and training, the goal should never be to place blame or use metrics to punish agents with poor results. The focus should always be on improving the experience for end users.

Determine how and how often to analyze feedback data

• Analyze and report scores from both transactional and relationship surveys to get a more holistic picture of satisfaction across the organization.
• Determine how you will calculate and present satisfaction ratings/scores, both overall and for individual questions. See tips on the right for calculating and presenting NPS and CSAT scores.
• A single satisfaction score doesn’t tell the full story; calculate satisfaction scores at multiple levels to determine where improvements are most needed.
  • For example, satisfaction by service desk tier, team or location, by business department or location, by customer group, etc.
• Analyze survey data regularly to ensure you communicate and act on feedback promptly and avoid further alienating dissatisfied users. Transactional survey feedback should be reviewed at least weekly, but ideally in real time, as resources allow.

Calculating NPS Scores

Categorize respondents into 3 groups:

• 9-10 = Promoters, 7-8 = Neutral, 1-6 = Detractors

Calculate overall NPS score:

• % Promoters - % Detractors

Calculating CSAT Scores

• CSAT is usually presented as a percentage representing the average score.
• To calculate, take the total of all scores, divide by the maximum possible score, then multiply by 100. For example, a satisfaction rating of 80% means on average, users gave a rating of 4/5 or 8/10.
• Note that some organizations present CSAT as the percentage of “satisfied” users, with satisfied being defined as either “yes” on a two-point scale or a score of 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale. Be clear how you are defining your satisfaction rating.

Don’t neglect qualitative feedback

While it may be more difficult and time-consuming to analyze, the reward is also greater in terms of value derived from the data.

Define a process to respond to both negative and positive feedback

Successful customer satisfaction programs respond effectively to both positive and negative outcomes. Late or lack of responses to negative comments may increase customer frustration, while not responding at all to the positive comments may give the perception of indifference.

1. Define what qualifies as a positive vs negative score

E.g. Scores of 1 to 2 out of 5 are negative, scores of 4 to 5 out of 5 are positive.

2. Define process to respond to negative feedback

• Negative responses should go directly to the Service Desk Manager or whoever is accountable for feedback.
• Set an SLO for when the user will be contacted. It should be within 24h but ideally much sooner.
• Investigate the issue to understand exactly what happened and get to the root cause.
• Identify remediation steps to ensure the issue does not occur again.
• Communicate to the customer the action you have taken to improve.

• Positive responses should also be reviewed by the person accountable for feedback, but the timeline to respond may be longer.
• Show respondents that you value their time by thanking them for responding. Showing appreciate helps to build a long-term relationship with the user.
• Share positive results with the team to improve morale, and as a coaching/training mechanism.
• Consider how to use positive feedback as an incentive or reward.

Build a plan to communicate results to various stakeholders

Regular communication about your feedback results and action plan tied to those results is critical to the success of your feedback program. Build your communication plan around these questions: