Figure 1 calls out several important workflows with other groups or activities within your organization. This reflects that fact that team governance addresses a wide range of concerns, many of which affect your team.
Other teams, groups, or activities support the governance of DA™ teams in the following manner:
- Continuous improvement. People share improvement suggestions with each other to help spread good ideas throughout your organization.
- Data management. One of many important aspects of data management is to collect and share back, ideally in real time, intelligence about what a team is doing and how well they are achieving their outcomes. Data from outside of your organization will also be leveraged as available and as appropriate. They provide dashboard technology to the teams, perform data analytics on the gathered intelligences, and guide teams in the usage of data and data technologies. They will also develop, evolve, and support data-oriented guidance as part of your overall governance efforts.
- Enterprise architecture. Your enterprise architecture activities may produce common roadmaps, models, and guidance for teams to follow. An effective strategy is to embed enterprise architects, often in the role of Architecture Owner, on DA teams to help ensure that the team follows architectural conventions and to provide a concrete feedback mechanism to the enterprise architects. The architectural guidance may include coding conventions, user interface conventions, security conventions, and many others.
- Governance. Your organizational governance activities will often provide guidance, such as enterprise policies or value statements, that apply across your organization. It will also provide domain-specific guidance, for example data conventions, security guidelines, customer experience (CX) guidelines, finance conventions, and more. This guidance would be collaboratively produced, evolved, and supported with your organizations data management, security, design, and finance groups respectively (if you have them). The governance team will work closely with your legal team to identify, understand, and disseminate regulatory guidance to teams. Finally, the governance effort will leverage intelligence provided by data management to help identify how to best guide various teams across your organization.
- Portfolio management. Your organization’s portfolio management efforts provide the initial team funding and vision to get them going, effectively giving them initial direction.
- Stakeholders. A team’s stakeholders will provide direction to DA teams regarding what functionality they want and the priorities thereof. Stakeholders will also provide regular feedback and other forms of input to the teams. DA teams produce consumable solutions for stakeholders and provide visibility regarding what they are doing and how they are working – this provides stakeholders with greater transparency and opportunities to steer the teams.
- Strategy. Your organization’s leadership team will drive your strategy, including the identification of your organizational objectives, values, desired outcomes, potential initiatives, and potential measures of success. Your strategy will be an important motivator for how you will govern your teams.