Taking Data Governance from Theory to Practical Application

There is a lot of theoretical hype about data governance in the data management world, some valuable, and some not so valuable.

I personally have a hard time with any articles that try to cut data governance down to the “five most important things”. To me, it’s akin to saying, here are the five most important things you need to remember when trying to disassemble and reassemble a Boeing 757. You just can’t distill it that far and expect anything useful. Usually, this is the type of white paper produced by a marketing department run amok and useful only as a preface in the book of data governance.

Instead of trying to distill it, we need to become students of data governance and then take that knowledge and shape it for our company. It’s safe to say that the list of five, ten, or twenty five most important things to watch will be different across industry, across the company, across the globe, and across time. That’s why I have plenty to write about in this blog, and plenty to talk about on my webinars.

However, I wanted to share with you another chapter in the book of data governance that speaks to practical application. My colleague Len Dubois had a chance to interview Nigel Turner and Dave Evans from BT Design. I’ve mentioned Nigel and Dave before on my blog. They have a phenomenal story of starting up small and building increasing ROI over time. They’ve calculated huge gains in efficiency, to the tune of $1 Billion. I also credit them for the very clever Do Nothing Option.

If you’d like to hear this three-part podcast series, as told by these pioneers of data governance from Wales, please follow the link. The podcast covers the information quality challenges tackled, software selection, and lessons learned.