With Big Data Comes Big-Time Data Governance: UPMC’s Forward Push

Yes, it is, because many, many people are involved, and many lack information or don’t have an enterprise-wide perspective. So it’s very important to select the right people for this.

What advice would you have for healthcare IT leaders across the country about all of this?

Two things. First, if you’re still in a situation where you’re still selling the concept, then the organization isn’t ready yet. They have to feel the pain first. And our organization is ready, because we’ve now begun investing in big data, and frankly, if we don’t do this, we’ll just have another big data pile. The second big thing I would recommend is, don’t quit; the bulk of the data governance programs fizzle because people quit. I just went through this with the Data Council yesterday. It was an “OK” meeting, and I went to the chair, and asked, is this still valuable? And he said to me, the fact that we’re in month 18, the fact that they’re still coming and still talking, shows we’re being successful. So you have to find people who are stubborn, because you’re never done with this; it’s going to be the way we work now, and you have to just keep coming back.

And we have gotten some key people in key roles, such as members of the Data Governance Council. I did our BI management for years; and when you’re put in charge of business intelligence and you have absolutely no data governance, it’s a really hard job. And people don’t survive, they get fired, because of the all the data governance issues. So my role, and I report to Lisa, is to make sure this all works. A lot of people say that data governance shouldn’t be in IT, but all this work resides in IT right now, and it will take years to push it out of IT; and we do manage the tools of IT here.

You kind of touched on some progress made and lessons learned already. Do you have future plans you might like to share?

Sure, two things. First, we do have a maturity model that we got from IBM, very detailed, and it guides us through our maturity process, so we refer to that to help us begin to build the program. We’ve begun work in all the categories, and our roadmap shows us taking that enterprise-wide. And a lot of our work focuses on data analytics, in the three key areas I mentioned. Over the next three years, you will see us expand the membership of these virtual teams to go beyond IT and into the business, so I actually see these teams becoming departments eventually. So eventually, we’ll be doing these things for all systems and projects. We’re changing the system development life-cycle process.