Data Governance Matters

In Data We Trust (But Wear Protection Anyway)

Reese Thomas

Tom’s latest guest post certainly raises the question of what part did data practices play in this current situation. Bad decisions can, and do result from many other factors than the quality of information available. Data Governance could be viewed as an organization’s immune system.

A fully implemented and mature Data Governance program certainly will not protect an enterprise from risky management decisions; the healthiest immune system will not offer protection for risky behavior such as unprotected promiscuous sex. A compromised immune system will make it much more likely that even a casual contact with a flue carrier will result in transmission, a healthy immune system will help minimize both the rate of transmission, and the severity of the infection.

It could be argued that in many of these cases, plenty of warning signs were in place, I don’t know if the extent that data practices contributed to any one company’s demise could be determined, or how much were just bad decisions. 

Still Tom, in many of the cases I suspect you are right, data practices were a major factor in bad decision-making, and even for the cases that the data was not the (or even a) major factor…

Any physician knows, the better the overall health of any patient, the better the odds of survival for any cataclysmic health event. And that’s certainly where governance comes in.