This past week, I attended the DGIQ event in San Diego. It was a great event, full of people who really want to start a data governance revolution in their organizations. But in many of my conversations with attendees, I found that they were struggling to make data governance a success. For some, they faced a data dictatorship, where data governance put a control clause on every piece of data. locking it down tightly. This forced the business to back away because they felt all these restrictions on the data held them back. For others, it was quite the opposite story. Their organization was a complete data anarchy that lacked any real process, structure, or leadership. But regardless of whether the customer was too tightly controlled or dealing with the data wild west, my advice to them was the same. The power lies with the people – the data citizens.
So you may be wondering – what is a data citizen? The answer is very simple. If you use data to do your job, then you are a data citizen.
As data citizen, you have rights within your organization. It’s your data. Rethink the boundaries of what it can do. Embrace the knowledge and skills to create and share data that’s more reliable, transparent, and productive. Free your data. Break down data silos and create new levels of collaboration.
It’s your data. And these are your rights.
Data citizens, I’ll leave you with a call to action:
Join the revolution. Rise up against the data dictators. Fight the data anarchy. Stand tall for the data democracy. Own the data, use the data, improve the data, share the data — and do it with the infrastructure and safety that promotes value and freedoms and limits risk.
It’s your data. Go spark a data governance revolution.
