The story so far: Alex, a senior leader at an ambitious insurance brokerage, had seemingly solved Lemon Street Brokers' data issues by bringing in the DataBee tool. She moved on to a new role, and now George is looking after data - which has just been the subject of Internal Audit's review. 

From: dandavies@lemonstreet.co.uk

To: georgeheath@lemonstreet.co.uk

Subject: Review of data governance

George - I've had the draft review through from IA. Pls take a look and put some time in my diary to discuss.

Ta,

DD.

-----------------

From: hichamjacoub@lemonstreet.co.uk

To: dandavies@lemonstreet.co.uk; georgeheath@lemonstreet.co.uk

Subject: Review of data governance

Dan and George,

Please find below our preliminary findings from our data review. Let me know if you want to discuss any of them, otherwise we'll submit to ExCo on Friday for the meeting on the 25th.

Approach 

We've carried out our review based on the Data Governance Framework supplied to us by a specialist consultancy, Datazed Associates.

Data Ownership 

We reviewed the listof data owners and data stewards which you provided to us. We noted:

• Two data stewards and one data owner are no longer employed by the company, and those roles need to be reassigned.
• One steward is from our outsourced IT provider and they should be replaced by an inhouse employee.

We interviewed two data owners and two data stewards.

• One steward exhibited a good understanding of the importance of data quality and their role in it.
• One owner and one steward were aware of their role but sketchy in what it entailed;
• The other data owners seemed to be unaware of why their name was included and suggested that we speak to IT as they are responsible for the systems.

Actions: Data team to update the list of data owners and stewards and ensure that they have been sufficiently trained. 

Data Quality 

We reviewed the data quality KPIs as submitted to OpsCo each quarter, and noted that they trend green; with the occasional amber being added to the Data Quality Log for management.

We did not find any evidence of challenge on the KPIs, such as whether we are looking at the right data sets and whether there are new sources of data which need to be added to scope.

Other data quality requirements are managed through manual controls. Some teams were able to share a tracker of the control activities being carried out; but others were unable to evidence other than through anecdotal emails.

Actions: Consider if DQ KPIs are fit for purpose; Increase monitoring (or automate) manual controls. 

Data Lineage 

We were provided with a large-format Visio diagram which was last reviewed in August 2021 but the change control indicated that there had been few updates since November 2016. In particular:

• The NEPTUNE platform was not shown in the lineage; and
• PLUTO was still shown, although it has since been descoped.

Action: Data team to conduct a full review of the end-to-end lineage diagrams. 

Data Issue Management 

We looked at the issue management log and sampled a few items to validate the
activity. We were happy that issues and concerns are added to the log and progress is tracked.

We note that some of the earlier items are still shown as "in progress" after more than three years, and would like to see these items closed in an appropriate manner.

Action: All items which have been open for more than 12 months to be resolved, mitigated, escalated or closed. 

Thank you for your time and your co-operation during this review.

Kind regards,

Hicham Jacoub, Head of Internal Audit

George read through the email. Infernal Audit he called it. They always seemed so nice in the meetings, then produced a document that made you sound like you were useless. This time wasn't so bad as most of the shortcomings pre-dated him. Still, it was going to be on him to get this resolved.

He reached for his yellow notebook, and started jotting some ideas down on a page.

A week later, George and Dan were in a meeting room on the client floor, their discussion only lightly intruded by the shouts from some anti-banking protestors who thought they were outside Lloyds.

They all seem reasonable, but there's a lot of work to do. The main problem is that I'm going to need a lot of input from the data owners and stewards, and I can't get the time with them. Every other meeting is a no-show, or they come late and "have to" leave early.

For data lineage, I did some Googling and found a tool that can do it for us, but it's really pricey.

That's in the new module, but we can't get that without moving to the latest version of the tool, which means we'd have to upgrade our licence and migrate to their cloud
product.

That covered the theory, but it doesn't get me the time I need with the business.

To be continued

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