Executive Sponsorship is a vital component to any company’s successful execution of its strategy, through data-driven decision making and a sound data governance program.

Executive sponsors help executive teams, aspiring executive teams and executive leadership development professionals achieve their goals by providing guidance, direction, and motivation.

THEY PROVIDE EXECUTIVE COACHING SKILLS AND SIGNIFICANT RESOURCES THAT CAN LEAD TO BETTER BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, DECISION-MAKING AND INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR PROBLEMS IN THE MARKETPLACE.

This benefits the entire organization, including senior executives and senior leaders who depend on executive sponsorship to help keep team members and upper management motivated and accountable to embrace a more data-driven organization.

In this blog, Mr. Egbert Irving, who is a Training and Development Specialist with over 20 years of experience in executive training, strategy development, and execution with leading Caribbean corporations, organizations, and government agencies, helps capture the idea behind an executive sponsorship.

WHAT IS A DATA DRIVEN CULTURE?

It is the collective behaviors and beliefs of people who value, practice and encourage the use of data to improve everyday decision making.

Ensuring that your company is operating within a data-driven culture from the leadership level and throughout all other departments, can benefit employees, decision-makers and ultimately bring more value to the business.

WHO IS AN EXECUTIVE SPONSOR?

Leaders who recognize, embrace, and promote the importance of implementing a data-driven culture to gain a competitive advantage.

They can also be called the data champions and become data stewards who build and foster a community through consistent communication, engagement, and support.

They also know they can achieve this through Incus 10-point Framework and Tableau.

NEEDED SKILLS: LEADERSHIP, AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE FRAMEWORK, AN UNDERSTANDING OF DATA CULTURE.
WHAT DO THEY DO?

THEY ESTABLISH BUSINESS PRIORITIES OR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES.

They set and communicate the vision for modern analytics, ensure projects are aligned to transformational initiatives, identify staff for project roles, and ensure accountability.

THESE LEADERS SET THE EXAMPLE AS VISIBLE AND VOCAL USERS OF THE PLATFORM, USING FACTS OVER INTUITION AND PLACING DATA AT THE CENTER OF EVERY FORMAL AND INFORMAL CONVERSATION IN THEIR RESPECTIVE DEPARTMENT MEETINGS.

For this, the executive steering committee should have regular meetings around project scope, prioritization, success measurement, responses to gather feedback, and value documentation.
To succeed the team will need to understand current and future capabilities, challenges, and objectives.

HOW DO THEY GET THESE BUSINESS OBJECTIVES DONE AND INCORPORATE THEM INTO BUSINESS FUNCTIONS AND THE BUSINESS PROCESS OF THE OVERALL ORGANIZATION?

• Communicate and Evangelize – communicate and evangelize your modern analytics vision across the organization and at every opportunity.
• Represent – represent the interests of your respective stakeholders to establish budgets and funding.
• Align- align the use of analytics with strategic initiatives and projects that drive organizational transformation.
• Approve – approve governance processes, policies, guidelines, roles, and responsibilities for managing the organization’s data in compliance with business and/or regulatory requirements.

Data and analytics as well as data visualization are critical to the ability to maintain business value today and sustain future success. Executive sponsorship and activism play a central role to achieve these ends. 

THERE ARE THREE MAJOR CATEGORIES WHICH CHARACTERIZE THE NATURE OF EXECUTIVE SPONSORSHIPS:

IT Sponsors are responsible for Tableau installation, configuration, and maintenance, partner with business leaders and SMEs, enables secure governed data access, and transition content authoring to business users.

Analytics Sponsor implements the vision for modern analytics, ensure the availability of data and content, establish education plans and learning paths by organizational job functions, facilitate communication throughout the user community, and aggregate business value achieved.

Line of Business Sponsor advocates for data-driven decision-making within their respective teams, promotes content authoring and governed data access, encourages collaboration and sharing, and documents business value.

ULTIMATELY, ALTHOUGH THESE JOB DESCRIPTIONS MAY DIFFER, THEY ALL HELP CONTRIBUTE TO THE COHESIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF A DATA GOVERNANCE PROGRAM AND DATA DRIVEN CULTURE.

A data governance program is a process that aims to establish rules and regulations for an organization, as well as handle any data-related concerns that may arise. Furthermore, having this sort of program in the organizational structure helps with metadata management, maintaining data quality.

They make sure that the company’s policies are followed. They tell a firm who owns the data and who has authority to perform certain activities with it.

IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT PREPARING FOR THE INCUS 10-POINT FRAMEWORK AND TABLEAU, DATA ANALYTICS AND ITS POTENTIAL BENEFITS, OR SIMPLY LEARN FROM MR. EGBERT IRVING, TALK TO US AT INCUS SERVICES TODAY!

If you’re a data novice, start, or looking to get the most out of your existing data management, get into contact with Incus about their workshop or specific services. 

Take a look at how we help clients.