Society of Women Engineers

CLIENT:

SERVICES:

Data Strategy and Governance
System Selection
Cybersecurity

The Challenge

In 2019, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) contracted DelCor to assist with the organization’s data governance goals. The organization formed the SWE Data Governance Workgroup to advance the efforts to locate, codify, and prioritize SWE’s data. We joined in this effort as consultants to help the workgroup develop a strategy to improve the organization’s data maturity.

The Process

Our team reviewed SWE’s existing data governance documentation, Strategic Plan, and current technology management practices (e.g., budgeting, decision-making criteria, staffing and resources).

To expound on our research, we conducted discovery meetings with the organization’s different departments to identify and document gaps in data governance and privacy; identify desired integration points and purposes; and establish methods and procedures for tracking data quality, completeness, redundancy, and improvement.

Based on our analysis of the information revealed during the discovery meetings, we developed findings and recommendations for the organization’s data governance initiative.

Services used for
this project

Data Strategy and Governance

System Selection

Cybersecurity

The Solution

We recommended that SWE take the following steps to improve their data maturity:

Revisit the charge and composition of the Data Governance Workgroup due to staff turnover and competing initiatives
Establish a data glossary that contained the key business terms used throughout the organization and provide information designed to improve the organization’s understanding and use of data
Identify the core data elements that compromised the master data to help SWE connect data across departments and systems within the organization
Complete the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance program that SWE had already started
Revisit data access permissions to ensure that staff members had the appropriate level of access to data based on their role
Develop data quality procedures and tools

The workgroup used DelCor’s recommendations and prioritized tasks to outline quarterly tasks and benchmarks to address in 2020.

Since completing the project, SWE invited us back to assist the organization as they select virtual event technology. We are currently helping SWE engage in sound practice while they evaluate the many options and considerations for creating the virtual component to their annual conference.

“DelCor was a dedicated and collaborative partner on the technology segment of our financial audit. Their contributions were instrumental in ensuring that GIH kept abreast of the ever-evolving IT and cybersecurity requirements in these challenging times.”

—Elena Anderson, Director of Finance and Operations, Grantmakers in Health