VIDEO | BD Associate Director: Financial Reporting is Almost the Circulatory System of a Business

(US and Canada) Sara Willovit, Associate Director of Product Data Governance, BD, speaks with Mark Johnson, Fusion Alliance Regional VP and CDO Magazine Editorial Board Chair, about critical data elements, the similarity between financial reporting and data governance, and the importance of data stewardship.

Willovit starts by mentioning that critical data elements differ by domain, and that it is critical to involve the business side in developing them.

Drawing a parallel between financial reporting and data governance, she suggests that the CFO is almost like a CDO with large amounts of consolidated financial data flowing into financial reports. Willovit says that, having been a financial auditor, she was easily able to transport a lot of her finance skill sets to data governance. She explains that financial reporting is almost the circulatory system of a business with every transaction ending up in the books. Similarly, data, as it flows through the system, is almost like the circulatory system.

Speaking on data governance, Willovit mentions that the ideas of compliance and regulation are built into financial reporting, and the culture can be replicated for other domains like customer, product, and supplier data. She starts with data quality because other areas of data governance may not be something employees can relate to. She typically initiates a data governance program with a data quality pilot, she adds

When asked about addressing the challenges of establishing value delivery through data governance, Willovit says that new leadership and the shift from multiple enterprise resource planning systems to one provided an opportunity to bring forward design decisions across various groups of stakeholders and implement data standards, which then got configured within the system. At the same time, the shift provided an opportunity to use the data quality pilot to showcase ways to systematically monitor data and expand into data management tools.

Sharing advice on organizational structuring for those trying to start a data governance program or data quality improvement initiative, Willovit says that having a stewardship organization is the most important dependency for the success of a data quality pilot. The data stewards are needed to help develop the data quality rules, she explains. Once the errors are exposed, the leadership can get on board, Willovit concludes.