Data Governance Blog

Confusing What’s Urgent with What’s Important

Recently an acquaintance summed up data governance as “trying to do what is important, while be sidetracked by what is urgent.” To me this was an interesting observation, because it sums up a paradox associated with data governance. Resolving urgent data quality issues uses so many resources, there are often none left to implement the data governance processes that would resolve the root cause of data quality issues.

So what is the better approach, go out and fix individual data quality issues, or fix the underlying common cause of the majority of data quality issues…poor data governance? Many organizations will choose the former path. They will follow the guidance of old-school consultants and focus on data quality alone. The end result being a lot of urgent work getting done, but the important long-term solutions get missed.

For those who have a data quality as the only focus for their data governance program, assess the results. How is that approach working for you? Are you reducing your overall IT costs? Are you reducing the number of data quality issues that resulted in operational losses? Most probably not, since many businesses are spending a good deal of time patching urgent issues without fixing the important root cause. They are treating symptoms, not resolving the problem.

At WaMu before the collapse, we recognized this as an issue. We were spending an incredible number of resource hours reconciling systems, correcting errors, fixing data quality issues, patching applications, and basically chasing our tails. The common denominator for all the problems and hours spent was that the cost could have been avoided with better up-front data governance.

The lesson learned was that data quality initiatives alone are not sufficient. The argument could be made that actually they can make matters worse by lulling an organization into falsely believing they are doing something to fix data quality, when they are actually prolonging the problem.

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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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