I work for a financial services company based in Canada and we have four different business units made up of mortgages, credit cards, banking and investment and insurance. On my team, we have people who are dedicated to one or more of these business units, so everyone has a core BU they support.
Before I get into anything, I want to note that this is a work in progress and no way we have cracked this. Everyone’s requirements are slightly different and I look forward to reading your comments in the discussion below to learn the approaches you’ve taken to address data governance.
As I mentioned, we have four different business units groups, each with a business unit analyst. This analyst owns and manages their own.group of categories. So, for example, mortgages will have one dedicated person and as you can see we've got tons of events.
What we realized over time is that with changing teams, changing websites and CSS selectors and so on, events get outdated very quickly. If we don't stay on top of them, it's hard to keep them verified over time. If you verify something once, there's no guarantee that it will still qualify as something that is verified six months later. There are two parts to this: the first is to get things to the verified stage, and the second part is keeping them verified over time.
We've been trying to get more events to a verified stage - something we didn't focus on in the beginning when we initially started using Heap. Our first goal was to stack everything and analyze everything, but now we realize that we have to clean things up before we can open it up to other people.
So the way we have gone about cleaning it up is by starting with an event naming convention. If I click on New Event, you can see we've got these naming conventions set. Any new events must follow this naming convention and must be approved by my team. That’s how we are managing all new events.
For all the events that already exist, I meet with my team once a week to work through the categories, going down the list of events to verify them one by one.
We set a quarterly goal as a percentage of events that needs to be verified by the end of the quarter. By evaluating these events together, we can do a lot of knowledge sharing and we can troubleshoot together if we run into issues. Lastly, we can figure out if events need to be archived or updated as a team.
Want to get on track for data governance? Start by going to Account > Manage > Data Governance and configure your naming conventions like my example above.
I’d like to hear how you are addressing data governance in Heap - add your comments in the field below!
