Data Governance Blog

5 Simple Criteria to Determine What to Govern

With increasing frequency, people are asking, “what is a simple solution to data governance?” They, and likely you, are looking a silver bullet to bring order out of chaos. The ironic part of the problem is that it is not a new problem; rather it is an old recurring problem with a new name. What our industry is dealing with is really a traffic and logistics problem. Once you look at it in that light, how to solve it becomes easy.

If data never moved around there would be no need for formal data governance. The least amount of governance would be one person, one application, and one set of rules. A lone developer, working on an application that they alone would use, where they alone can revise the rules at will is the most basic form of data governance.

But data does move around, and just as vehicle traffic requires governance, so does the movement of data. This is the first criteria for data and processes needing governance. Did the data move away from the source application?

Data moving alone is not the sole criteria for governance. Take a car moving down an unoccupied road. Little if any governance is needed, but bring other vehicles into the mix and now we need common understanding on how to interact with one another. By managing expected behavior, we reduce the risk of conflict and collision. So that gives us the second criteria for governance. Does the data move along shared networks?

By this time you should be starting to see the parallels between data governance and vehicle traffic governance. They differ in name only. It only goes to follow that the next criteria and the most important deals with convergence at an intersection. Does the data integrate with other data?

Data that does not integrate well has diminished value to an organization. It can become a source of discord and conflict. That adds risk to the operations of the organization. The next criterion is also risk based and deals with data content.

It is based on the old saying, “for the lack of a nail the war was lost” sets the argument for the importance of logistics to an army. The modern equivalent would be for the lack of the right data, the business failed. So the next criterion is: How critical is the data to the success of the business, or organization?

The final criterion deals with preventing unintentional damage or harm. Again this maps back to traffic governance in that, society has decided that certain hazardous cargo, and large vehicles pose a risk to be managed. As a result these are widely regulated. Likewise data that could be damaging when improperly handled, or have a very large impact on the business requires oversight. The final criterion addresses this. How damaging could the mishandling of this data become?

Using these five criteria, any organization can determine what they should govern. Equally importantly, the reasoning for each area can be articulated to business sponsors with relative ease.