Data Governance Blog

Governance and Innovation – Complimentary or Contradictory

On LinkedIn, the following question was posted by Asad Quraishi in the IT Governance Group discussions.

Does IT governance promote innovation?

There’s enough compelling research demonstrating the value of governance to the bottom line. This ranges from studies showing that firms using IT governance best practices are 20% more profitable than their peers to showing that firms with both aligned IT-business strategies and effective IT practices have a 3-year compound annual revenue growth 35% above the average.

What about innovation? Does anyone know of a study that shows boosted IT-related innovation in firms with good governance practices? This can include business process innovation. Does anyone have specific examples?

My answer:

It would be good to see a study on this. My instincts and experiences say, “Yes IT governance promotes innovation.” The caveat would be if you are governing the right thing. If you are giving standardization to fundamental elements of a subject, you free the mind to focus on applying creative energy to higher levels where there is more value.

Take an artist as an example. Much work has been done to standardize color in print, images, and electronic displays. If the artist chooses to leverage that work they can focus on the creative application of the standard colors. They also have some artistic license to choose when to leave governance and mix their own colors.

It is the same for developers. They are already provided, in the structure of their programming language, a broad palette of functions, and commands. They are governed by the languages they choose to write their code. That frees them to build the higher level functions of an application. That is where the innovation occurs. Should the existing functions and commands prove inadequate they still have the ability to create new ones, which again is a point of innovation.

Answer these for yourself. Do you want your data modelers and developers to spend their time on deciding the length, data type, and attributes of the field FIRST_NAME? Or would you prefer they use that time to determine how to apply this building block in the data model or application? Which effort is a more efficient use of their time?