Three 'Active Customer' Counts and a Six-Week Close
Northbridge Financial acquired a health-analytics startup fourteen months ago. The combined company now runs three customer marts: retail banking reports 1.42M active customers, the acquired analytics unit reports 980,000, and the broker channel reports 1.19M. Each number is defensible inside its own unit, but the CFO needs one figure for the annual report in six weeks. A data governance council was formed after the merger, but it has no charter, meets quarterly, and its 11 members were selected by title rather than by data domain. The catalogue lists 2,300 data elements; 41% have no named owner, and the 300 certified elements carry an average of 2.7 conflicting definitions. Stewards are volunteers with no allocated time, and the only escalation path is the CIO's chief of staff. The CEO has asked for a recommendation that will not stall the finance close.
1. The CEO asks why three 'active customer' counts exist. Diagnose the governance failure and specify the decision rights needed to produce one reported number.
Read the worked answer
The problem is not primarily a definition problem; it is an authority problem. Three counts coexist because no single accountable owner can bind all three units to one term. The council cannot substitute for that owner: it has no charter, meets quarterly, and its membership by title means the people in the room often cannot commit their units. A 41% unowned catalogue and 2.7 definitions per certified element show that ownership is nominal.
Recommended decision rights:
- Accountable domain owner for Customer. Assign one executive, most plausibly the CMO or COO, final decision rights on the enterprise definition of 'active customer'. The owner proposes, decides, and is accountable for the outcome.
- Consulted, not co-deciding. Finance validates materiality and external-reporting fit; Legal reviews disclosure language; each business unit supplies impact analysis. Consultation must not become a veto.
- Council as conflict resolver. Recharter the council to handle cross-domain conflicts and standards, with a 10-business-day decision SLA and an appeal route to the CEO or CFO. It should not draft definitions in committee.
- Steward executes. A named steward maintains the definition, catalogue entry, and quality rules, with funded time rather than volunteer effort.
For the close, the CFO should make a time-boxed interim decision: designate one mart as the reporting source, require a reconciliation bridge from the other two, and disclose the method. Documented dissent is acceptable; an unresolved three-way consensus requirement is not.
2. Propose a stewardship operating model sized for the company's current evidence, including how stewards are funded, how work is prioritized, and which metrics show it is working.
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The evidence points to a capacity and prioritization failure, not a shortage of meetings. Start with a tiered model: executive domain owners who are accountable, domain stewards who decide day to day, and technical custodians in IT who implement. Keep a central governance office of two to three people for method, catalogue, and escalation; do not centralize all stewardship.
Size by critical data elements, not by catalogue count. The 300 certified elements are the useful starting population. Group them into roughly 10 domains (customer, account, transaction, product, reference, employee, vendor, and similar) and fund 0.5 FTE per domain for the first year, about five dedicated FTEs. That is a real cost, but it directly addresses the finding that volunteers have no allocated time.
Prioritize with a single queue scored by regulatory or financial materiality, number of consumers, and existence of a current conflict. Definition changes, quality issues, and access requests should all enter that queue with service levels. Do not let stewards absorb every exception; route remediation to data owners and engineering.
Useful metrics:
- Percentage of critical data elements with an accountable owner and approved definition.
- Median time to a definition decision and number of open cross-domain conflicts.
- Exception backlog and median triage time.
- Number of reported figures restated because of a definition or data defect.
- Steward capacity utilization, to prevent the new model from becoming volunteer work again.
Review these monthly with domain owners and quarterly with the executive committee.
3. Six weeks to one number. Set out the decision process, including who decides, what evidence is required, and how dissent is handled.
Read the worked answer
Treat this as a decision sprint, not a modelling exercise.
Week 1 - frame and quantify. The Customer domain owner convenes Finance, the three unit leads, and Internal Audit. Build an impact analysis showing how each definition treats dormant accounts, broker-introduced customers, and acquired-unit accounts, and quantify the revenue, risk, and disclosure effect. The aim is to expose the material differences, not to compare labels.
Week 2 - decide. The domain owner decides against explicit criteria: fitness for external reporting, auditability, stability over time, and cost to produce. 'Most accurate' is not a workable criterion in isolation, because each count is accurate to its own process. The CFO approves the use of the definition for the annual report; these are separate rights and both must be recorded.
Weeks 3–4 - prove it. Build a reconciliation bridge from each legacy count to the chosen number. Finance validates the bridge; Internal Audit reviews the evidence. Dry-run the annual-report figure.
Week 5 - endorse and record dissent. The council endorses the enterprise definition. Dissent is documented with its impact, but unanimity is not required. Units that need a different operational view may publish it under a distinct label such as 'management view'.
Week 6 - operationalize. Publish the definition and owner in the catalogue, version it, attach quality rules, and brief report consumers. The decision is time-boxed and reversible only through the same owner, which prevents the issue from reopening during the close.