March 4, 2007

3:30 PM - 6:45 PM

Level: Introductory

You have a Help Desk to provide assistance with technology issues. Why shouldn't you have a Help Desk for Data? Why shouldn't your business and technical staff have a single point of contact to find out about data definitions, permissions, and data-related rules? Why shouldn't your organization have a way to efficiently and consistently answer questions and address concerns?

In this workshop we describe how to quickly and inexpensively build a help desk designed to field data-related questions from across the organization. We show how having a single point of contact for data issues solves business problems, reduces organizational friction, and manages risk. We describe how a help desk can free your data, metadata, compliance, and process experts from the drain of addressing routine questions, while ensuring that critical issues are escalated appropriately. Participants will step through the process of triaging calls, responding to typical questions, and invoking industry-standard processes for classifying and escalating calls. Participants will leave with workflows, checklists, and a plan for quickly ramping up an inexpensive prototype.

On workshop completion, participants will be able to:

•  Describe the business benefits of having a single point of contact  for data-related questions.
•  Articulate business, technical, and compliance risks that can be  managed through a Help Desk for Data.
•  Present a plan for a low-cost help desk operation that could be  operational within weeks.
•  Describe types of questions a help desk should be able to  address.
•  Describe a typical triage and record-keeping process.
•  Describe a typical issue escalation workflow employing existing  resources.
•  Describe strategies for aligning efforts with Data Quality,  Governance, Metadata, and IT operations.

Gwen Thomas is President of The Data Governance Institute and publisher of their flagship website, www.SOX-online.com, the web's largest collection of vendor-neutral Sarbanes-Oxley news and information. Gwen has designed Data Governance programs for Sallie Mae, Wachovia Banks, NDCHealth/Wolters Kluwer, Disney, Coors, and others, often partnering with organizations such as IBM and systems integrator CIBER. As an employee of CIBER, she designed their Sarbanes-Oxley practice and worked with a series of large and mid-sized organizations to reduce risk in data integration, web portals, and content projects. A frequent presenter at industry data events and contributor to publications such as z/Journal, RiskCenter's SarboxAlert, and FSI (Financial Solutions International), Gwen is author of the book Alpha Males and Data Disasters: The Case for Data Governance.