From Confusion to Clarity: Streamlining Issue Management

Challenge

Towards better stakeholder communication

In today's fast-paced business landscape, organizations are dealing with increasingly complex environments where multiple stakeholders are involved, and silos can easily arise. This was the case for one of Datashift's pharmaceutical clients, who was struggling to manage their data issues effectively. Due to the decentralized nature of their operations, the vast amounts of information available made it difficult to handle issues transparently, and problems were often lost across departments. Issues ranged from incorrect reporting on Qlik reports to misalignment between externally provided data sets, security and access issues, and more. The client turned to Datashift in helping to address these challenges. A solution that would streamline data governance and improve stakeholder communication was the main objective.

Datashift's first step was an extensive analysis of the current situation. We discovered that the current system involved multiple mailboxes, ad-hoc teams messages and calls where all the different types of data issues would enter. However, there was no clear business process defined on how to tackle the different issues that came in, and requestors had no knowledge about the state of the data issue that was raised. Datashift also collected business feedback regarding a potential improvement of the use-case.

Approach

Defining a Clear Ownership and Developing a User-Friendly Issue Management Flow

Together with the appropriate stakeholders we defined clear ownership of a potential new flow. Assigning these responsibilities are the backbone of any future developments as there is no quality without governance. As a result, we developed a flow in Collibra which allows for adequate issue management. This involves escalation triggers, feedback loops, transparency of the flow, push notifications and other features. From a user experience perspective we reduced the number of clicks to raise an issue to an absolute minimum and without having to leave your data environment in which you are working, by leveraging the Collibra Browser Extension. For example, a user can start logging an issue regarding a specific KPI in a report directly in the environment of the BI tool (Qlik, Tableau or Power BI).

Finally, a change management track was set up to ensure a smooth implementation into the existing processes. Numerous trainings, open-door and one-to-one sessions with the end-users and issue manager were held. Along with user-friendly and embedded documentation, the users quickly adopted this new process.

Impact

Better ticketing is a huge time gainer and cost saver

Together with the client, Datashift improved the issue management flow drastically within three months. A problem can now be logged in less than three clicks, without having to open the ticketing system. By leveraging the report catalog documentation in Collibra, every issue can directly be linked to the correct measure in the reports. This leads to better data governance and ultimately to time and cost savings.

The impact of Datashift's solution was threefold:

1. For users, logging problems and questions is now much easier, clearer, and faster. Previously, there were many different communication channels, which caused confusion and ambiguity. Now, an issue manager is assigned to dispatch problems to the right people with one click.
2. For management, quarterly evaluation meetings provide a summary of all the issues that have arisen, and that knowledge is used and shared with procurement to renegotiate data contracts and assess their effectiveness in the operations. Contracts can be terminated or renegotiated if poor data quality is spotted on a consistent basis. Also, weak spots in the data chain can be spotted and acted upon where systematic improvements need to be made (e.g.: fixes in an ETL process).
3. For the organization, everybody is now aware of this business process, reducing the time to updated reports, reducing the number of incorrect figures and thus leading to better and faster business decisions.

In summary, Datashift's solution helped the pharmaceutical client streamline their data management, improve stakeholder communication, and led to better data governance.