Interview with Michelle Bauman, Director of Data & Reporting Services, Lion

Michelle Bauman, former Data and Reporting Services Director at Lion ANZ, shares her tips on building sustainable data governance processes

Updating your entire ERP environment can be a daunting task, especially when the culture and governance processes which support it are as archaic as the system itself.

In this interview from Data Champions Online, ANZ, Michelle Bauman, former Data and Reporting Services Director at beverage company Lion explains how she overcame this challenge and got her company excited about data and analytics.

“We have invested very heavily in the change management side of things to really help bring [the data] to life,” Bauman says, “And help people understand that as we are transforming the business, the benefits that data will bring them in the future.”

Evangelizing data and analytics

For Bauman, the first step to achieving good data governance was creating processes to assure the quality of data coming through their systems. The next major focus was creating subject matter experts (SMEs) to evangelize data and analytics inside the company.

“From a people perspective, really making sure that they've got the right capability in place and that we have our ownership structure in place as well,” Bauman says. “We have data owners and data SMEs in our organization to really help lift that capability and knowledge across the organisation.”

Part of the role of SMEs is sharing data and analytics success stories with the wider business, and getting people excited about the wider application of data and analytics insights to overcome business problems.

“When we're able to share examples with the business as to how they can gain value from that information and what insights we can gather from our data that really excites them and really helps them understand how they can evolve their business, gain more insights, overcome some of their challenges,” Bauman says.

She concludes: “That's really helped to invigorate our data governance structure and get people really excited about data across the organisation.”

Key Takeaways

• Quality data is an essential building block. Put effective processes in place to ensure the quality of data.
• Focus on people. Effective change management and ‘data evangelists’ will raise the profile of data and analytics.
• Win the support of senior leadership. Support from senior business leadership is essential to making change happen.