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Marty explains why making data governance declarations is an essential part of the process

I was on a great Super-Webinar yesterday by TDWI that was quite informative (Master Data, Quality & Governance: How to Achieve It and Why You Should Care). I heard several references to "policies" and "business rules!" I can't tell you how thrilled I am that I'm beginning to hear this in the public discourse - it's been a few years that I and others have been talking about this, and I think it's finally starting to gain traction.

So, a quick recap, while it's fresh in my mind:

First of all Jill Dyché gave a great keynote, hitting all the right topics on business focus etc. in supporting MDM and DG projects. The other host, Phil Russom, did some great interviews and hosted the event, as well as offering a helpful recap at the end.

One of our Initiate customers, Grange Insurance, offered sage advice and lessons learned. I also had the privilege of speaking along with reps from Kalido and Talend, two established vendors who have recently entered the MDM space with respectable offerings.

There were several good questions at the end of the webinar, and not enough time to go through them all, unfortunately. Oh, did I mention that there were 1,127 registrants for the webinar?  And over 300 showed up! The tweets on the webinar were the most I've seen in such a short time for a webinar - fantastic!

Marty’s Key Takeaways

There was a general recognition and agreement that MDM & DG are best enjoyed together, although DG has a much broader reach than just MDM projects. There were good lessons learned on the importance of expectations management and scoping for results, as well as taking an iterative approach - all tenets that line up exactly with our approach.

There was also agreement that DG is difficult and engaging business leaders can be even tougher. It’s easy to get off-topic and focus on other subjects that interest IT folks but have less real impact to business leaders.

I also heard, as I mentioned above, that the act of writing policies is front and center for DG activities - the main responsibility of a data governance initiative.

That's where I started to get a little more excited. We have to agree on the fact that data governance produces something more than recurring above-average concentrations of CO2.

They produce agreement and compromise and shared understanding and shared vision and shared objectives. They define why data management for certain kinds of data are critical to their enterprise. They define what levels of quality must be achieved for certain classes of data, and how that should be done. They identify who owns responsibility for decision-making and for taking prescribed action to manage the quality of select business data.

DG initiatives define where actions must be taken and how to remedy bad data. They define the procedures that must be followed when certain things happen. In a nutshell, DG initiatives define the Who, What, When, Where, Why & How of data management - starting with the most critical kinds of data and working to the less valuable.

I've written about Policies etc. in a prior blog post (Hear Ye! Hear Ye!), and I'm looking forward to presenting the content in more detail in an upcoming webinar, “Data Governance Directives: Principles, Policies, Procedures, Rules & Metrics – Oh My!” This is the fifth in a series of webinars on Agile Data Governance that I began last fall (you can view those webinars on demand). I've tipped my hat to these concepts of "declarations" of DG boards, and now I'm going to go through them in a little more detail.

As always, I'd LOVE to have you join me on July 20, and I'd LOVE your input, feedback, criticisms, etc.

Happy governing!