"Why I Hate Data Governance"

Data Strategy Leader Louis de Roo hates tidying up. In this blog he explains why cleaning up your data and Data Governance are especially important.

As a child I loved playing with Lego. And certainly not always by the instructions; more often I would throw all the bricks into a pile and then start on a fantasy construction that was bigger than any regular Lego set. The downside was that this inevitably created some rubble, and the growing pile of Lego bricks in the room did not make it any easier to find that one piece that had to fit on my creation, so my building site soon took up half the living room floor. Just as reliably, there was my mother, who firmly ordered me to clean up that mess before dinner.

When we work with data, we build too. We build new insights, decisions and ways of thinking. And there, too, a mess often arises. Because not every source is equally reliable. And while Lego bricks still have a fairly consistent fit, that is far more doubtful with some data. But on your journey of discovery toward a new data product, you invariably run into the fact that not all data is equally good or reliable. Time to clean up the mess, then.

"Time to clean up the mess"

I do not always like tidying up. It not only forces you to do something you did not ask for, it also forces a decision about what you do and do not consider important; what you do and do not want to keep, and in many cases also a decision about what you still expect to need in the future. While tidying, I quickly get distracted by all the new possibilities I see while categorizing, and I would rather look at what other constructions I could make. But my mother is still standing there in the room, looking stern, and all the castles in the air disappear back into the storage bin.

My mother was of course right. If I had never cleaned up all that Lego, my construction would have kept growing, but it would also have become harder and harder, and eventually impossible, to keep the mess around it under control. You see this at many organizations too: as their data landscape grows in complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep data quality and reliability under control.

Cleaning up and organizing

So it is important to start cleaning up and organizing before the job has grown over your head. Preventing a mess is a lot easier than cleaning one up. Although it is not always a popular step either; in the energy of the moment, nothing dampens your enthusiasm like being told you have to work in an orderly way. Management and policy quickly feel like a restriction, and that can be a serious damper on your creative process.

But it is necessary: anyone who wants to keep trusting the quality of their data will occasionally have to ease off the enthusiasm a little and think carefully about the durability and reliability of that data. That may be a bit of a damper, but it is wise. Data Governance is an important precondition for not getting lost in your own mess in the long run. It ensures that our creations can grow along with us and remain reliable and available in the long term. So that new insights can eventually find a place in our data landscape too.

Data Governance

So I (slightly) hate Data Governance. Because I love free association, creative space and inspired exchange of ideas. It is always annoying when such a spoilsport turns up. If you invest too heavily in Data Governance, you run the risk of smothering innovation in the bud. It is important then to consider what level of Data Governance your organization needs: as much as necessary, but no more than needed. Are quality and reliability of the utmost importance for your operations? Then you will have to set up your Data Governance much more robustly than if you are a company that mainly steers on broader patterns in the data. Consider whether you work with confidential or sensitive data, and what the impact of incorrect data could be. How your organization handles data determines whether you will need to do a lot or only a little with Data Governance. But for every organization, doing nothing is not an option.

After all, someday you will have to clean up your room!

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