Data Governance Matters

If your name is Steve Jordan, and if you don’t want a surprise spoiled, stop reading.

For the rest of you, Steve is one of my dearest friends, and I happen to be bringing him a little gift from London, where I’ve been speaking at the DM&IQ conference. His gift is a mug with the words Mind the Gap - a phrase you see all over the London Underground (subway system). It’s printed on the platform and announced on the loudspeaker to remind riders to avoid stumbling on the gap between the platform and the subway cars.

“Mind the Gap” is also the name of a 2004 movie  by Eric Schaeffer that members of Steve’s and my Sangha watched together a few years ago. It’s a quirky film with seemingly unrelated plotlines and characters that finally come together. Fun and also thought provoking.

Steve and his wife Johanna Jordan (who is special to me beyond words) have had many thought-provoking conversations. We joke that we’re all in the same business: he’s a child psychologist, she’s a family therapist, and I work in Data Governance. Many of our discussions have been about Buddhist psychology.

The phrase “mind the gap” has meaning there. For about 2,400 years followers of this psychology (the idea that it is a religion is a modern invention) have known what brain imagers and scholars in cognitive studies have just started validating: there is a tiny but noticeable gap between when a feeling arises and when a person makes a decision to act on that feeling.

The ability to recognize this gap can help one choose a path other than the default, unconscious choice -  a path that might reduce suffering in the world (or at least in an individual).

So what does this have to do with Data Governance? Over time, organizations and individuals have chosen responses to data-related triggers such as issues, conflicts over standardization or integration, and opportunities to define or align business rules. Over time, if an organization chooses the same response repeatedly, it builds up a sort of “muscle memory” and that response becomes automatic - even when conditions change and it’s no longer the best choice.

So one thing that Data Governance professionals do is learn to recognize those situations. We learn to identify  the gaps between triggers and responses, and we help data stakeholders prolong the gap so that thoughtful, mindful analysis of useful options can take place.

Of course, to be successful, these leaders have to be mindful themselves. After all, when dealing with stakeholders who have inherent conflicts of interest (and human personalities), feelings such as irritation and anger are bound to arise occasionally. We have to mind the gap within ourselves so we choose personal actions in response to those feelings that won’t result in new sets of suffering.

Yikes. Emotional, passionate Gwen is still learning this. Now I’m thinking I should have bought a mug for myself, also, so I can fill it with a nice cup of chamomile tea to take into contentious meetings. Hmmm… maybe I can order one over the Internet…