Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you ever wondered what's actually hiding in your shared drives, trailblazer Insight scans your files locally for pii, hipaa, PCI and other compliance risks. No cloud, no IT ticket, just answers. Search Trailblazer Insight in the Microsoft Store.
Hello. Thank you.
Pardon me.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: I said good morning and welcome to what Counts.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Every organization hides a story in its data.
This is what Counts, the podcast that digs into the governance problems people inherit, inherit, ignore and discover too late. I'm Lee and in each episode, my co host Maura Dunn and I bring to you the hard earned lessons from the room where the real work happens.
So, Maura, in our last episode we looked at the big picture, how the entire industry shifted from old school records management to modern information governance just to fight through the digital noise.
But clean dashboards, unified data and automated workflows don't just happen by accident.
This episode we'll talk about some action principles to get us there.
How do you feel about that?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: I feel that some days are harder in the room than others.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Like this room.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Like this room on this day. Yeah, but it's okay because we're going to talk about these action principles and I think that these are, these are kind of universal things that we've learned over the years. And we see them playing out in different ways in all the different projects we've been talking about, all the different projects that we've not even mentioned during our show in the past couple of years. But there are three of them that I want to talk about, three information governance action principles. And there's something that we just sort of keep in mind as we go through every project and I think something that everyone should keep in mind as they go through their lives of managing information.
So first, one, stop making copies.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Impossible.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Absolutely possible.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: I just don't see it. I mean, even, what if I send you an email and I put an attachment, boom, there's a copy, right?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Send me an email and give me an attachment versus put something in our SharePoint and send a link together.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: It just doesn't seem to work quite right that way.
But it is the way to go.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Limitations. I was going to go through the other, I was going to just list out the others and then we'll come back to this. So principle number one, stop making copies.
Principle number two, focus on data creation points.
Principle three, touch. Once used many times, they kind of all go that they all go together. As you can see, they're about being mindful in creating data which we've lost. That As a global society, we have lost that mindfulness in creating data because it's so easy to create data. Anybody with a phone can be on the Internet in one minute and post whatever they want. They can type something, they can talk, they can show a video, put out pictures. It takes nothing except a phone. That's it.
So it used to be harder to put data together.
Think back to my Sumerians and their clay tablets.
Think back not quite as far, but to the print, before the printing press, when books had to be copied by hand and not very many people could afford them because it was so expensive to first make vellum and, and then make parchment and then make paper or the Federal Records act in the early part of the 20th century in the US that was the first time that federal records were allowed to be destroyed. Because prior to that, the assumption was that if it was important enough to write down on paper, it was important enough to keep.
So over the years, you can see, and it's getting faster, the time, the framing, this, the speed keeps accelerating with.
It used to be really hard to create information and to disseminate information.
So the information that was created and then shared was more valuable and more thought went into it because this was your only shot to get it out there. And it was going to be really expensive and hard and hard to correct and hard to add new information.
But if you can just pick up your phone and say whatever you want, and then five minutes later pick up your phone and say something different, then there's very little thought. So what we're talking about here in these principles is let's put some thought back into this, because you put a lot of thought into running your business. You put a lot of thought into the, the moves you're making strategically or how you're creating your product and why you are doing that and how you want to get it out to the public.
So there should be equal thought given to the creation and management of your information. And that's really what these principles come down to.
So let's go back to that. Stop making copies one and how it's so much easier to send an attachment in an email instead of a link to a collaboration space.
And I was starting to say that there, there are limitations to some of the collaboration tools. I was frustrated this week trying to change a, a bullet list in a document on an online version of this document that a client had shared. Client shared the document with me. I was able to edit it online, no problem. But when it came to putting in a chart that I had to create offline in a spreadsheet and then drop it in and then putting bullet points around that chart. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't make. The formatting wouldn't work because the online collaboration version of Microsoft Word doesn't have all of the same features as the desktop version, which is frustrating, for sure.
So
[00:06:26] Speaker A: wait a minute.
You send me a link and it says, maura Dunn has shared this document with you. Click here.
Okay, so who here in the audience, since we have so many listeners, One growing body of listeners is logged into that system already.
Right? That's one thing. Because I'm not. So I have to. So I click the link and it brings up my login. I have to decide which login it is. Because, you know, for some unknown reason, I have a personal account, and I have the. The business account that is confused by Microsoft, not me, but by Microsoft. It's confused. Then once I do that, then I got to check my authenticator. I got to get through that. Right. And now I'm in. Now I can see it.
And what do I do? What's the instant thing I do? Download to desktop.
So now. So now I'm working inside of Word. Right, Right. Instead of in the.
What, the online version. Whatever you want to call that.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Well, now you've created a copy is what you did.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: I shared it with you as a link, and instead of editing in that space, you created a copy on your desktop, which may be replicated on your OneDrive. And now we have at least two copies again.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: So how only two of us and we have two copies again.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Well, wait a minute. The point is, how unusual is that sequence of steps?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Not unusual, but my point isn't that this is what everybody's doing now. My point is that this is where we need to go. Because the challenge with this, with that approach, which I grant you is a common approach, but the challenge is you think you have the new one, and I think I have it because I think I shared with you the most recent one and that you're editing in there, and you think, no, I didn't edit in there. I'm making changes over here. But you forgot to tell me that. And you didn't send it back to me, and you didn't upload it back to where it was.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: No, I did. I sent it to you in an email.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: It created four more copies. One in your sent box, one in my inbox.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: Very difficult to retrain somebody to do this.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. No, there's A training question too, but the point of doing it is about reliability.
We're trying to make data more reliable because the reason, and this goes back to the paper world too, where we would interview people now, showing how long we've been doing this. Why are you keeping copies of all those things?
We asked a lot of people that over the years. We've asked many people that. What do you do when you finish this document? You finish creating this document? I give it to whoever asked for it. And also I save a copy just in case somebody comes and asks me.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: I make a copy of it and I put it in my files.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: And people do that in all the different organizations that we've talked to people about that, in government agencies, in private companies, in the big consulting firm that we used to work for. That was one of the places that came up all of the time. It's because I don't trust that I'm going to be able to find it later because the data is not reliable. So the more copies you make, the less reliable the data is.
Like it's a paradox, but it's true.
This is why Principle 2 focus on data creation.
How does data get created? Who's allowed to create something?
And what are the rules around when a new instance of something, when a new document is created, when a new counterparty record is created, when a new location is designated? What are the rules that everyone has to agree to?
This is when we are going to create a new X, a new project, a new location, a new contract, whatever.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: This is where we're going to save it.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: This is where we're going to save it.
This is how it gets created. These are the things that have to happen in order to create a new one.
This is where it's going to be.
And then we have a couple of other things that need to be decided.
Where does it go? It gets created in one place. Does it get shared with other systems or other people?
Do people automatically get. You can have a SharePoint site and I'm sure other collaboration tools will let you set up a notification that every time something gets added to this library, you get an email and says, hey, something's new is in your library. Here's a link to it.
Is that something that you want to happen when a new contract or new document or whatever is created?
Or does it get pushed into some other enterprise system or some other business point system so that it's available for other purposes as read only? It can't be changed?
And then the second piece is, how does it get Changed. Suppose you have a new location that gets created in a master data system.
You're a company with a large geographic footprint and you have field locations and construction sites and mailing locations and employee offices and whatever else you have all different types of locations. Turns out there are dozens.
And you've agreed on some principles about who's allowed to create a new operating location and give it a new identifier. And this is the system where a new location originates.
But over time you have. Things happen, like post offices move and new zip codes get created and you have to change the address of that operating location. It didn't move, but you have to change it.
Who's allowed to change it? And if the person who's on site doesn't have the right to change it, then what's the process for them to say, hey, our post office moved and you have to update the zip code.
Or you are bringing in, you're buying, you know, your company's buying a bunch of locations from another company.
And they had old names and old designations that were in the system that the other company had.
But you're going to move them into your system. You're going to give them new identifiers, possibly new names, maybe not.
Who gets to do that? What are the rules for that?
And how do you disseminate that information to everybody who needs to know it? So that work of touch once and use many times, you don't want to be creating copies because then you just have things that don't match. And. And then somebody. The farther removed in time you are from when the change happens, the less likely somebody is going to be around to know why, right? To know why and be able to say, oh yeah, or what? It's Old Rabbit. When we started, it was Red Rabbit when we were keeping our project secret to do the acquisition. But the old name was, I don't know, Pink Bunny. And we didn't like that name, so we named it, you know, I don't know, Armadillo, Armadillo Ranch.
So it had three names. And the people who were involved, the people who came from the other company, they knew it was called Pink Bunny. The people who were involved in the top secret acquisition process, they knew it was called Red Rabbit. And the people who are here now, they're like, well, where's all the data from for Armadillo Ranch? Because none of the old data has Armadillo Ranch on it.
So that process, if you don't have a standard process for how data is updated and how things are documented and how to trace it back. Then somebody at the end is gonna go, I don't know. Where's all the data for Armadillo Ranch? I guess we don't have any.
Which means either we are out of compliance for something, or we can't respond to an audit or a litigation or discovery request, or we're going to have to spend money because we have to. We have to respond to those things, or we just. We want to do another construction project here and we need to know what's here. So we're going to have to do
[00:15:09] Speaker A: a survey or we can't collect money
[00:15:11] Speaker B: because we can't collect money because we don't know we have rights to it. Like all sorts of problems with. With. We've got a disconnect between how the data is organized now and how the data came in and was previously identified. So these rules, these principles about stop making copies, focus on data creation and touch, once used many times, they have practical implications of we're following those principles. Then when the data came into the company, because we did the acquisition, we're creating something new at that point. Right. We're creating a new location inside Company A that is acquiring this asset, and it's going to be called Armadillo Ranch. And in order to create that location, we need to update all the data that's coming in. We need a crosswalk from the old data to the new data and make sure that everything gets updated so that people looking at Armadillo Ranch can see the whole history. That's a data creation principle and it should be part of an acquisition process.
The same thing happens when you construct something new, but you have less data to deal with and it's more under your control.
It just seems easier when you start from scratch. But you can apply the same thing to inherited data. These principles really will work across.
They will work across any type of data, and they will get you to more reliable data overall.
But they're hard. Like, they seem simple. Stop making copies.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: I'm just going to start with the first one. That one you just said.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Stop making copies. Focus on data creation and touch. Once used many times, those are. They are simple to say, they are clear, and they are hard to do.
So you're telling me we've already talked for 15 minutes about this and we haven't gotten to how.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Yep. Next one.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: I say next time. Next time we'll talk about how. Because I think what we really need to focus on is our current tool set, email in particular, and the limitations of the collaboration tools.
They are reinforcing our bad habits is
[00:17:30] Speaker A: what's happening or creating workarounds.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: We are creating workarounds to reinforce our bad. Right, Right.
And that's because the value of following the principles all the way through isn't clear.
So next time, let's talk about that value, because the value comes in the data reliability.
You're looking skeptical about that. You're not seeing the value or. No, you see the value, you're just ignoring it. What was the, what was the phase for?
[00:18:02] Speaker A: I'm not too sure. You gave me too many options there at the end.
So the value has to be clear.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: The value has to be clear because it does take, it does take an effort to change the way you're doing it. And of course, it's easier. Everybody, we're used to email. We adopted email so well as a culture.
That was, that's not that long ago, truly.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: But compound that with chats and text messages and, you know, just the speed of communication.
And now you got all kinds of messages and ways of messing up the data.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: All sorts of ways to create data and touch, once used many times, is out the window right now because we are making copies as fast as we can breathe.
So, yeah, we're going to talk about that value, that value proposition to make your data more reliable and more accessible and why these principles are worth it to get us there next time.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: If you have any questions, please send us an email at info trailblazer us.com or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com or check out the Trailblazer Learning Academy at www.trailblazerlearningacademy.com.
thank you for listening. Please tune in to our next episode. If you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network or like or subscribe to our channel. That always helps. Podcast channel. Same thing as always. We appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes. Jason Plake created our music.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Thanks everyone. Talk to you soon.
