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Do you think data governance is the best thing since sliced bread, or do your eyes glaze over every time you hear the term? Are you still grappling with the “so what”?

If you are in the enterprise software industry, you are being bombarded with the phrase “data governance”. If you are someone who lives and breathes data governance – Thank you! I am looking towards becoming you one day.

Even graduates from fields as far-flung as anthropology are finding statistics and data analysis to be a lucrative path, as the demand continues to grow for people who know how to work with and understand data.

As Carrie Grimes, a recent Harvard grad told the New York Times last month, “People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis.”

Indeed, data analysis is everywhere – and eager to get into our living rooms. But are we ready for it? And once we let data in, will we ever get it out again?

IBM is carving out a special niche for data-hunting services within its Global Consulting group and plans to retrain or hire 4,000 more analysts across the company. These are all leading edge indicators pointing to the fact that corporations now have copious amounts of data and are desperately looking for individuals who can turn that into knowledge.

This future of “mining for knowledge within data” is eager to get into our living rooms. The fear is, are we ready for it and if we let it in, will we ever get it out again? Here are some examples:

• Netflix spent $1M dollars on improving their recommendation systems.
• Cisco spent $250K on soliciting innovations from all over the world to decide what to do next.
• Google spends countless R&D dollars synthesizing data to improve search and understand people.
• The government of the United States is facing the mighty challenge of explaining their vision and spending strategy to the citizens and has devoted a website to the task: http://it.usaspending.gov/.

The common theme is that data is cheap, ubiquitous, tantalizing and can be VERY, VERY misleading. The most important step in the quest of turning data into wisdom/knowledge is, knowing how much trust to place on the data being synthesized. This is the principle that is at the heart of data governance.

Data governance is a means to an end. The end can be enforcing compliance (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc) or increasing mind share and affinity (Netflix, Amazon, last.fm, Pandora, iTunes recommendation engines), or reducing cost of sales (Dell, FedEx). They all begin with knowing how much trust to place on what pieces of data and how to maintain the level of trust going forward.

Data governance is not the magic blue pill and neither does it help realize the dream that one day every company will be able to translate its terabytes of data into a virtual Oracle of Delphi.

What it does deliver on is the ability for a company to start small, build confidence in its data and incrementally get to a deeper understanding of both the outside (customers, markets) and the inside (sales, manufacturing, fulfillment, etc).

This deeper understanding - aka trust - can then be efficiently converted to a new market, new product, more customers, increased compliance or other benefits.