How To Do Data Governance Better

Why do so many data governance programs fail? What are those common pitfalls that we can avoid, and what approaches work better?
In today's episode, we have a conversation with Shinji Kim on how to do data governance better. She is the Founder and CEO of Select Star, an intelligent data discovery platform that automatically analyzes & documents your data.
In the session, Shinji shares some of her thoughts and best practices on data governance, from why data governance is becoming harder, challenges enterprises face, why you must be clear on your initial goal in data governance, and metrics to measure data governance impact. Besides, she expounds on tools that can help in data governance and why quality and trust should be your priority!

For more effective tips on data governance, tune in to this episode!

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in:

• [00:26] About Shinji Kim’s background
• [01:41] Reasons why data governance is becoming harder
• [06:26] Defining data domain and why you need domain knowledge
• [08:47] Challenges enterprises face with data governance
• [12:34] Understanding the initial goal you want to achieve with data governance
• [16:03] How companies measure the impact of data
• [18:57] Whether you need data governance in small companies
• [25:39] How to explain to the project team you are there to help them out and not slow them down when they pull data from the wrong sources
• [29:31] About Select Star
• [34:20] Tools in tech that help in data governance
• [35:54] How do you prevent data and analytics from just going rogue to ensure trusted data and reproducible AI
• [38:02] Ensuring trust and quality in your data
• [40:12] Ensuring freshness in your data
• [41:02] Motivating people to contribute to metadata and building standards for lineage as some challenges in data governance

Notable Quotes

• A lot of organizations are focusing on a particular application like ERP and CRM, and that's their core focus on data governance. With that mentality, they are unable to grow into an enterprise-wide data governance program.
• The main part that needs to be clear to the data governance and everyone else involved is “why we are doing this and what’s the main purpose.”
• We can't address data quality without having data governance in place.
• Set a clear focus that's a little bit more restrained in stock and maybe focus on a specific domain like the customer, location, or vendor. Start with one or even a subset of that first. It's more manageable.
• Without governance, you can’t trust your data, and executives need to ask themselves if trust is the priority.

About Shinji Kim

Shinji is the Founder & CEO of Select Star, an automated data discovery platform that helps you understand your data. Before that, Shinji studied Software Engineering at University of Waterloo and General Management at Stanford GSB. She then analyzed data and built enterprise applications at Deloitte Consulting, Facebook, Sun Microsystems, and Barclays Capital. She was the first Product Manager hired at Yieldmo, where she led the Ad Format Lab, A/B testing, and yield optimization. Lastly, before founding Select Star, Shinji was the CEO of Concord Systems (concord.io), a NYC-based data infrastructure startup acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016.

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