Compliance Options: Hidden Stakeholders and You

by Gwen Thomas
January 1, 2007

A recent client experience made me think about the challenges you face as you try to serve the needs of all your own clients, internal and external.

But first, a confession. I need to describe what I see when I think of you. I picture a maze: a large building filled with offices and cubes. It’s a sea of beige, with beige walls lined with beige file cabinets, and hundreds of beige cubes arranged in an incomprehensible jumble of beige squares and aisles.

To find you, I imagine, I’d have to start near the elevators, go past the bathrooms and beige break rooms, and wander up and down a few beige corridors looking for the right cluster of cubes. I wouldn’t find it, of course. Finally, I’d poke my head into a beige conference room and ask the people inside if they could direct me to the mainframe group. They’d laugh, make a few jokes about rats and mazes, and then direct me to go past the cube with the big plant, turn left at the poster with the hang gliders, and then take a left, a right, and another right. I’d know I was almost there when I saw the collection of “Dilbert” cartoons.

That’s what I picture. I wish I could say I image a workspace with clear signs indicating the location of analysts, testers, programmers, etc., but in all my travels, I’ve never seen such a place—just seas of people who may or may not know the individuals sitting just three aisles away.

Which brings me to my story. I was at the client site, facilitating a Joint Application Development (JAD) session that brought together business and IT resources from across the company. We had two goals: to decide how to deal with some long-standing, data-related issues and to lay the groundwork for some future data governance activities.

Some of the people in the room knew each other; others had never met. The one thing everyone had in common was that their business processes and IT systems touched the data under discussion.

We were discussing a field designed to store a prediction: the date when a customer might be expected to graduate from college. This was of interest to the client’s marketing team, because they need to tie their marketing efforts to such triggers. They were at the JAD session to ask other participants to use their processes and systems to help gather better data.

Some people in the room were clearly wondering why they were there. Couldn’t this have been handled with a few phone calls to IT people, they seemed to be thinking. The only group that uses this information is marketing—let them get what they need and leave the rest of us alone! And then something happened that caught everyone’s attention.

“Do I hear from the people in this room that this field is absolutely not subject to any compliance requirements?” I asked. There were nods around the room, and then one hand was raised. It was the woman representing the finance department.