A Data Governance Success Story in Times of Coronapocalypse

Mark the date: from 5th to 9th December 2022, Carmen Cercelescu (Data Governance Leader, Euranova), Oumaima Belghith (Data Governance Expert, Euranova) and Alp Aslan (Technical Lead, Toyota Motor Europe) will be representing their respective companies at the Data Governance & Information Quality Conference to take place in Washington D.C. 

‘What for?’, You might ask. Well, over the last three years, they innovated together and now want to bring forward to the world and other companies the best practices and learnings that have proved crucial for the success of their project: at a time of crisis and remote work, they set up a tailor-made foundation for data governance in such a diversified, large and specialist multi-national corporation as Toyota.

The project had three major objectives: 

• To support Toyota Motor Europe (TME) in developing advanced analytics use cases by enabling efficient data usage and breaking silos in the company’s processes.
• To set up an appropriate transversal data governance framework and a training program to support the data analytics use cases’ needs in a GDPR-compliant way.
• To scale up to the entire organisation by operating on a broader scope: we started with 1 use case, and we are now scaling up to an enterprise-wide level.

Euranova’s key values are exploring, crafting and serving; these pillars have been the special plus brought to the customer, too. We explore with the help of the Data Management Maturity Model 2.0 research paper: in the project's first step, we establish a company's data maturity and the objective they wish to reach. With this approach, organisations can pinpoint and express their needs and prepare for upcoming changes, avoiding the stress of jumping into the unknown. We serve by being aware that adopting the new data governance and data management processes may be a significant challenge inside an organisation. Therefore, the respect for the company’s culture, adaptability, and flexibility in the proposed approach are, for us, key success factors.

The impact is already tangible for TME: 

• Some key roles, in particular, have already benefited greatly from the framework, including compliance users, data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and business users.
• Data users across TME can promote their data assets and request access to the right data from other use cases through a centralised business glossary that contains common definitions and well-defined ownership for all data items in separate domains. This also improves the communication between IT and business.
• Improved decision-making based on correct and maintained data.
• Saving business analysts time when doing manual impact analysis and easier tracking of the auditability and how data flows across the Toyota Group.
• Triggering new data governance initiatives across different divisions.
• Enabling the tracking of ownership for data items.
• Using the communication channels at TME to stream learning materials and use them as knowledge-sharing platforms.

Now comes the tricky question: What should companies that consider going for a similar project know before they start? The speakers have this to recommend to prospects: Be aware of your company’s culture and adaptability to change. Audit your current level of data governance knowledge and awareness. Understand the value data governance could bring to your entire organisation. Know that the new system would affect the daily tasks of different hierarchical roles from both IT and business. 

If you're attending the Data Governance & Information Quality Conference and want to hear more, catch Carmen, Oumaima, and Alp on stage on December 7th at 2:45 pm CEST. And of course, feel free to reach out to our data governance team.