Data Governance Blog

Data Governance and The Laws of Physics

As much as developers would like to believe that they have total creative license, they really are bound to some degree by the underpinnings of their development software. No matter the language, platform, or technology, somewhere along the line there are limiters on what a developer can do that govern their efforts.

Solution developers will resist it when possible, just as my brother once tried to defy the laws of physics. Now don’t get me wrong, Greg is a smart guy and thought through the problem. You see as he saw it, if you jumped off the back of a speeding convertible while driving down the street, as long as you ran at the same speed as the car you could just keep running. All of this was well within the laws of physics as he saw it.

So he makes his leap of faith off the bumper of that Chevy, his body still possessing the same momentum as the car. For a brief second he thinks he has done it and revels in the success of doing what no one in our town of 300 had done before. He begins to flail his feet wildly trying to match the running speed of that 20 mph car….unsuccessfully.

As his feet hit the pavement, the laws of physics kicked in with a vengeance. With his feet were traveling at that mere 10 mph, his upper body and torso kept moving at a blazing 20 mph. The speed differential resulted in a face plant was phenomenal by anyone’s standard.

So it goes with data governance too. It is inevitable that developers will want to extend the rules and boundaries of their software, and abandon tried and proven data management practices. This is fine as long as it is done in a controlled environment and then thoroughly tested. The time for that is not in the middle of your $10M project that is already over budget and late.

Data governance serves to manage project risk and prevent a technology face plant in front of your business partners. Large data systems have too much at stake to allow un-governed methods and cowboy mentalities to take hold. Yes, it can be boring and constrained compared to entrepreneurial environments, but the amount of money being risked is much less as well.