Data Governance Matters

Guest host, Reese Thomas

At every Data Governance conference I’ve attended, at the dinner tables, in the lounge and on break between  presentations and workshops, one question invariably pops up. It’s usually asked in the first person; some variance of “How do I sell Data Governance to our executive management.” Attendees are hungry to hear hints from the ‘I’ve been there’ people on this topic. I’ve even heard attendees announce after the resulting discussion, ” I’ve received more value from this conversation than from the rest of the conference put together.”

This is why I thought I might mention the up-coming Data Governance & Stewardship Community of Practice (DGS-COP) on-line event on this topic, coming up Thursday, Jan 22, 2009, 11:00 AM until 12:00 PM EST (GMT-5.)

This will be a discussion in the DGS-COP Knowledge Exchange series, and is one of the last events in this series open to non-members as well as members (available at no charge under the DGS-COP ‘Response to the Economy’ policy for events through January.)

I just looked at who’s registered to attend; I see several familiar names I know have a lot to contribute. Of course, Gwen will be moderating, she’ll chime in with some incites as well. If you are at all interested in developing your program’s executive support, I can’t urge you strongly enough to consider participating.

These events are limited in attendance, but as of this  blog posting, there are still some slots available.

BTW, if your organization’s policy restricts your participation in public forums, you are more than welcome to  email me at reese.thomas@datagovernance.com . I’ll be glad to ask your questions for you;  you can sit back and listen anonymously.

Here’s the link  for more information

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. 

Reese Thomas

Gwen’s currently on the way back from London, where she’s been cavorting, I mean interacting, with industry thought leaders at the Data Management & Information Quality Conference Europe 2008. She will undoubtedly gift us will some tales from ‘across the big pond’ when she returns, however…

I had to comment on an interesting, thoughtful, compelling and but somewhat disturbing article on BeyeNETWORK by John Myers, ‘Legalizing the Spread(Marts) of Business Intelligence. He draws a parallel between the thirst of power users for data, and the war on drugs. If you haven’t read it I’ll wait…

If you still haven’t read the article, let me give you a couple of excerpts that, while admittedly taken out of context, illustrate some of what I find disturbing. Please keep in mind this article is a thoughtful look at a very real and common situation, not a mindless rant.

“For many years, inflexible data governance organizations and IT departments have put a stranglehold on the development, distribution and consumption of analytical business intelligence applications – or at least they thought that they did.”

“Strident and driven, data stewards can be orthodox or inflexible in their definitions of and application of technologies.”

Wow.

Inflexible.

Stranglehold.

Strident.

Not very semantically flattering to the Data Governance practitioner, and not really evocative of the qualities that most of us would look for in a Data Steward.

It’s the fact that practitioners of a discipline that relies so heavily on communication skills to achieve objectives are regarded in these terms that I find disturbing.

Sometimes, your organization’s governance program may put limits and controls on users. How transparent or intrusive your program will be to the user will depend on many factors; your program’s focus, how the different types of stakeholders are represented, as well as how well the program was designed and implemented. If you happen to be a Data Steward, how stakeholders perceive your efforts to implement these controls depends on just one factor.

Communication.

Use your communication skills evangelistically, to educate and inform. It’s almost inevitable that at some point a stakeholder will be effected by a control; if you are the steward with whom they interact with, it would be nice if the stakeholder were cognizant of the reason for that control.

And not simply think of you as strident.

Consulting and Coat Hangers

Guest Host: Reese

One of my firmest convictions is that we are gifted with takeaways from almost every experience, we just need to be astute enough to pick them out. Here’s a recent one of mine…

It was over an hour before the meeting and about 10 minutes of driving to go when I pulled into the rest area. After the obligatory trip to the vending machine, I made a couple of phone calls then leaned back against the car for a few minutes of indulging in my favorite pastime, observing people.

There’s very little I enjoy more that listening to articulate, knowledgeable people talking about a field I’m not familiar with, and two men dressed in county maintenance uniforms discussing lift stations and flow patterns certainly fit that description. I was just turning to take one last sip of my drink before leaving when my elbow brushed the roof of my car and…

The cell phone hit the pavement, the back popped off, the battery skittered a few feet across the parking lot and down through a heavy grate. I walked over, and saw the battery about 3 feet below on the bottom of a culvert. The county employees walked over.

“Don’t worry; we’ll get it out for you. It’ll take few minutes, that grate weighs a couple of hundred pounds, we need to get the pry tool, a breaker bar with the right socket and put a cone out,” one said. “Sounds like a lot of trouble, let me try something first,” I replied.

I popped my trunk, pulled out a couple of wire coat hangers and a plastic bag (yes, I have that kind of a trunk,) straightened both hangers out, crimped the end of one of them around a corner of the bag, and squeezed it through the grate next to the battery on the bottom. I then took the other hanger, flipped the battery over into the bag and pulled it out.

It wasn’t until the ride home after my meeting when the takeaway from my experience hit me.

Those two men were intelligent, well versed in their field, and obviously had an established protocol to deal with the issue of getting into that culvert. However, it was a relatively labor intensive method, with my fresh perspective I was able to see a more efficient way to accomplish the task.

I’ve sometimes heard grumbling when a consultant is brought into an existing project. Bringing the newcomer ‘up to speed’ is sometimes regarded as just extra effort, after all, those involved have often been living and breathing the project for quite some time

But more often than you’d think, that newcomer just happens to have a couple of coat hangers in the trunk…

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself…

I’m Reese Thomas; the Media Director here at the Data Governance Institute. If you read here regularly, you probably already know I’m also Gwen’s brother. I wear quite a few hats here at the Institute; I’m primarily responsible for our information infrastructure as well as some of the content on our web resources.

I’ve been juggling a couple of careers for years. I owned and operated an events promotion and production service with a strong emphasis on in-depth demographic analysis and attendance projections, market surveys, and media analysis. During this time, I was also a performing musician-entertainer, often working 300 gigs a year.

I’ve found an astonishing number of skill-sets I’ve acquired from each of these careers invaluable in my present position…