Data Governance Blog

Minimizing What is Governed – Shortening the Path to Action

Recently I was booking air travel and some of the options struck me as odd routes. You know, going to your destination with two lay-over’s and a plane change. Oh and it takes about twice as long as a direct flight while the difference in price is minimal. So if we would not book our travel that way and we would not choose circuitous routes when driving either. Yet, routinely we architect information systems this way with higher overhead and operating expenses than needs to be spent to achieve the same goal.

A good guiding principal of governance is to minimize the number of things being governed. Shortening up the number of times you move the data from point of acquisition to the point of action improves efficiency in your information systems. This does two things, first it speeds up the movement of data from the point of collection to the point of analysis and action. Second, it reduces overhead associated with data management.

The latter can be significant and is often down played, but the reality is that every time you move data it requires bandwidth, storage, and most importantly human resources to operate and maintain the systems moving and storing the data.  Extending the number of data movements between the data collection and the data analysts often adds little true business value and ultimately increases risk and complexity. Intentionally reducing data movements becomes an effective strategy to undo the impact of those issues.

We all know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. In data, the most efficient system moves data between two points in the fewest steps. This becomes a competitive advantage when executed properly. It is ironic that most people are only separated by six-degrees, but with data we are often separated by 12 or more. It is like booking a flight from Seattle to Denver, via Chicago,  Atlanta, Dallas, LA, Minneapolis,  Detroit, New York, Newark, Columbus, and St. Louis.

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Thanks for stopping by. My writing is intended to take a lighter look at Data Governance, and toss in some pragmatic advice along the way.  If you are interested in more information on how to implement Data Governance in your organization, please contact me via LinkedIn or the email address below.

Regards,
Tom Jesionowski

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