Why user stories matter

Story telling is foundational for cross-functional communication, enabling governance to deliver business value. User stories highlight the metrics and KPIs that define success, forming the basis for business use cases. By collaborating with the business and leveraging user stories, the governance team understands challenges and develops relevant business metrics and KPIs that will resonate with the stakeholders.

The business use case canvas map helps articulate user stories to build business support and gain champions by:

Building alignment and shared understanding by being the source of truth
Providing clear communication across teams that may speak different languages (business jargon and technical terms)
Improving collaboration, trust and joint ownership of outcomes
Reducing risk by early identification of issues and solutions
Facilitating change management with a living document that can be updated with consensus

Many governance initiatives struggle because they lack clear business value, well-defined use cases and measurable impact. To ensure success, it’s important to identify the key drivers of success, establish a solid game plan for data management, and continuously evaluate whether governance projects are delivering value. The table below highlights important factors to put in a use case, along with common signs that indicate whether governance efforts are creating or failing to create business value.

Signs governance projects are not creating business value:

Lack of business champions
Poor user adoption
Difficult to get funding
Perception as a cost center
Governance decoupled from priority use cases

Signs governance projects are creating business value:

Visible executive sponsorship
High adoption and use
Metrics tied to business outcomes
Strong business partnerships
Governance use cases matter to the business

Here is an example of a business value use case where the business issue was poorly defined, the impact was unclear, and the business outcomes were misaligned between the business and delivery teams.

Consequences of not following a framework that emphasizes business use cases

A data governance team at a global e-commerce firm set out to showcase the benefits of a data product marketplace. Partnering with the marketing team, their goal was to improve speed and confidence in decision-making. Marketing proposed a new aggregated dataset to support upcoming campaigns to enable better segmentation, customer targeting for discounts and performance attribution.

In response, the governance team updated the business glossary, enriched metadata and built this data product to launch the marketplace. This was intended as a demonstration of how data products could be leveraged by the marketing team.

When the results were presented to the CMO and marketing leaders, however, the CMO asked, “So how does this data product help us hit our quarterly numbers?” The room fell silent.

The presentation focused heavily on technical governance—completeness, accuracy, schema validation, trusted sources, and data products but failed to address marketing outcomes or metrics important to the business. As a result, the marketing team struggled to see the relevance of the new data product. By emphasizing solutions instead of business outcomes, the communication created a gap that impacted the business seeing value from the governance teams efforts