Alexis
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Talk Tech with Data Dave. I am Alexis, not Data Dave, but I am here today with Data Dave to talk to you about all things data, all things cloud, all things technology, all things AI, all things D3Clarity. Dave, how are you today?
Data Dave
I’m very well, Alexis. How are you? Good to see you this morning.
Alexis
Yeah. I’m excited about our question today, and I’m also excited to remind our listeners, if you have a question for Data Dave, you can always send us an email at talktech@d3clarity.com, and we would love to answer your question on this podcast. You can also submit the question right on the D3Clarity website, or you can connect with either one of us on LinkedIn and send us a question. We would love to hear from you.
That said, I have a question for you, Dave, that comes with a little bit of a background. I’m going to give you the question first, and then I’ll tell you the context here. Data governance, we have talked about that so many times on this podcast. It’s something that we at D3VClarity consider one of our specialties. I also hear the phrase “information governance” all the time, and I hear the phrase” governance” just as is all the time.
So data governance, information governance, just governance. Like, what? Are they the same? Are they different? What do they mean? I don’t know. So that is the question. It’s a very long one. I don’t know how I’m going to turn that into a title, but here is the context.
When I first started at D3Clarity, the big boss, Preston, sent me this book called Information Governance for Business. And he told me to read this book so that I could learn about data governance. And so, from that moment, in my brain, data governance and information governance have been the same thing. Because I got a book from my boss telling me, “Read a book about information governance so I can learn about data governance.”
And then we go through these podcast series, and we talk about the difference between data and information during our last podcast. And so now I’m all like, “Well, wait a second, are they not the same thing? I don’t know.” I’m a little bit lost. I need some clarification.
Over to you, Dave.
Data Dave
Okay, interesting question. We’ve covered this or covered aspects of this a number of times in different podcasts, as you well know, there is more than a little confusion and ambiguity across that, across everything. And there’s also a lot to unpack in that question.
Fundamentally, to a certain extent, they have to be different.
Let me explain. If I am a border collie, if I’m a sheepdog, then my job is to govern my flock of sheep, to herd, govern, control, make sure my sheep are behaving as I want them to. So, I’m governing that flock of sheep. If I am Maria Van Trapp, I am a governess of children in the Alps.
Those are two very different commodities and very different jobs.
Alexis
But that was a wonderful Sound of music reference.
Data Dave
Yes, it was. I thought so.
Alexis
But yeah, no, okay. The sheepdog and Maria Van Trapp have very different things, but they are both governing.
Data Dave
They are both governing. Right. So, if you look at it from that perspective, they are both governing, then you have to look at the word being the same. You are managing, controlling, understanding, applying control to behavior.
If the commodities are different, and I’m not implying that children are commodities. Sorry, that was probably a bad reference. If the things that you are governing, if your commodities are different, then they are fundamentally different things. Data governance, information governance. If we can state that data and information are indeed different, and there’s a lot of gray area.
Alexis
Right. We definitely made that argument in the last podcast where we talked about how they are similar and how they are different and how maybe they are the same colloquially, but maybe not the same. Yeah, okay.
Data Dave
Yeah. So colloquially, they are often considered the same. They are often referred to the same. Does a librarian govern information? Does a librarian govern data? It’s a difficult gray area to determine. I often think of data as the raw commodity, just the pure data, if you like, the evidence of history, the pure recorded evidence of history, and the information has a certain amount of context around that pure data, so to speak, in which case they become subtly different. You would often describe information if I was talking about governing information. There’s often an implication that there’s an in. There’s an audience involved, that you are providing context and data to an audience in order to form knowledge in that audience or impart knowledge to that audience, and that would be the channel of information. So there’s often an audience implied with information.
If you start to apply those terms, then data governance becomes different to information governance because you can control your information because you’re controlling the flow of the information, the data, whatever, to the audience. The data is really about the collection and the recording of history versus the implied information that the audience is receiving. So, there’s an implication there that they are somewhat different, but they also overlap tremendously, is the way I look at it.
Alexis
Yeah, they would have to.
Data Dave
They have to.
Alexis
I think we called it the knowledge value chain.
Data Dave
Knowledge value chain, yeah. Data, information, knowledge, insight, action, whatever the.
Alexis
And so if we make the assumption that all data makes up information, then those two things would have to overlap to a certain extent.
Data Dave
Right, exactly. So there is a tremendous amount of overlap and there is a tremendous amount of ambiguity, and rightfully so within that structure. So locally, data governance and information governance are often considered the same.
And you could argue that knowledge about your data is information, therefore governing, that is governing the same. So you can certainly see those two being equivalent. When you remove and just say governance. What you’re really implying is business governance. There’s an implication there. This isn’t just the general word governance. Governance is a very broad term within the construct of business governance or governing a business then, or managing a business, or putting controls and predictability into the processes that support a business then. Obviously, data governance and information governance as it pertains to that business are subsets of governance. Now we’re not necessarily talking about regulatory compliance or regulatory governance or things like that that are for regulated industries or just normal industries. We’re simply talking about the understanding, documentation, control and adherence to published policy.
So I’ve got an organization, I’ve got a department, I’ve got a couple of employees, or just myself. I say I’m going to do this. Did I do it in the way that I said I was going to do it? You know, the SOC2 stuff and everything. Right? This isn’t necessarily about regulatory compliance so much as it is about, ”I said I was going to do it this way. This is my policy, my procedure. Now how do I know that I followed it?”
Alexis
Business governance, I like that idea because that, that’s a really nice, like big picture or a really nice catch all. I started to think about policies and procedures when you were talking about that. Yeah, like I wouldn’t call our timesheet procedure data governance. I would call it a policy and a procedure. But the truth is, kind of is data governance because it’s a way for us to systematically collect data in a way that we can form it into information.
Data Dave
So actually, let’s drill into that because I think that’s a brilliant example.
Alexis
Right, okay, fill me in.
Data Dave
So the governance of that is we’ve got a policy and a procedure that requires every employee to fill out their timesheet at the end of every week.
Right? The overarching business procedure, business governance is does everybody fill it out every week? Do we follow the rules, the policy that we’ve put in place to make that happen? The answer is a categorical no.
Alexis
I wasn’t going to say that, but I’m happy you did.
Data Dave
No. The answer is a categorical no. And I’m probably one of the worst violators, which is we don’t follow the procedure. So, there’s a violation of corporate policy. The corporate policy says this must be filled out every week. The data quality, data governance aspect of that is actually a lagging indicator rather than the leading indicator.
Alexis
Hold on, before you go on, explain that to me.
Data Dave
So a lagging indicator is something that you know about after the fact. A leading indicator is something that predicts a likelihood of an event.
Alexis
Okay, okay.
Data Dave
So what I mean by that, the lagging indicator in these timesheets is we get to the end of the month, we can’t close the month because my timesheet is not complete. There’s a data quality issue, there’s a measure, there’s a lagging indicator that the policy was not followed. Data is missing. We’ve got a data quality issue at the end of the month. That’s data quality, that’s data governance. That’s picking up the data is bad. So, we’re going to govern this data and make it correct. Yes.
Now, you can do a number of things. You could take retroactive action and ask me and say, how many hours did you spend on whatever? And fill it out for me. That is fixing the data after the fact.
Alexis
But that doesn’t fix the problem.
Data Dave
That’s data governance. But it didn’t fix the policy break. The policy break was actually that I did not fill out my time sheet every Friday along the way.
So, the data quality is an evidence of bad behavior. I didn’t fill out my timesheet properly.
So, if you push that upstream, the correct way to fix it is for me to fill up my timesheet properly.
Not going to happen necessarily, because we know history, you know, just reading history. Having said that, I’ve got better at filling it out once a month. So hey, that’s probably good enough. So, follow the spirit to the law, not the letter of the law to a certain extent. Right?
You see the difference there between the business governance, which is are we doing what we said we were going to do, which is fill out timesheets every week versus picking up the fact that there is a inconsistency or an incompleteness in the data and fixing it retroactively.
That’s the difference there. Now, is data governance part of business governance?
Alexis
Absolutely. Yeah.
Data Dave
Could you say that’s information? Yeah, absolutely.
Alexis
Especially because at the end of the day we do apply that data.
Data Dave
Yeah, exactly.
Alexis
Towards knowledge of something or another. Yeah.
Data Dave
It becomes information certainly when you put it on an invoice or whatever that they somebody owes his money, whatever it might be. So, yes, that’s the interrelationship, if you like, between information governance, data governance, and business governance. Correctly, you can use and should use all those together because this now leads into change management. And we’ve done that anyway. Right. So it’s kind of because we have egregious violation of the timesheet process, we change the process. So, either you or automated you sends out a reminder every week for people to fill out the timesheets.
So, that’s a slight change to the process to instigate change management to try and get people to do it earlier. And we continue to do that.
Alexis
Right.
Data Dave
And the project managers do it and other people do it. And it’s just rising, the visibility of that, to change that process and change people’s behavior, in this case my behavior, to say, “Dave, fill out your time sheet instead of me not doing.” So, there’s a change in behavior there. Well, that is change management. If everybody changed their behavior, data quality would go up, data would improve, etc. As it is, we’ve got a hard structure in place on the end of the month. So, we’ve got two barriers, end of week and end of month.
Alexis
And we have to have those so that we can do things with them, so that we can take those data points and we can apply them as information or as knowledge as we head up that chain. Because we turn it into how you get paid. We turn it into how we get paid as an organization. We run quality reports against it, we run utilization reports against it. We truly are taking those original data points and pushing them through.
Data Dave
Yes, exactly.
Alexis
We’re using governance on a lot of different levels there in a way that until this moment I didn’t really think about.
Data Dave
Yes, right. So, you’ve got the process governance, the behavioral governance and all. And it comes down to really simply, “Are we doing what we said we were going to do with this?”
This being data, this being information, this being behavior, this being sheep, children, whatever it might be. Are we doing what we said we were going to do? That is really governing. How do we know we are doing what we said we were going to do?
Alexis
So, we definitely just gave a pretty complicated answer. We broke that down really hard. But in practice, if our listeners are out there wondering which word they should use, what would you suggest? Should they figure it out down to the T, whether it’s information governance or business practice governance or information governance, or is there something else that they should do or try? I don’t know. What are your thoughts?
Data Dave
Honestly, I don’t like the word governance.
Alexis
Yeah, we’ve talked about that before. For sure.
Data Dave
We’ve talked about that.
Because it’s a harsh word and it immediately brings up negative connotations of being managed, being governed, being controlled, having police, having all sorts of things right on that construct.
In terms of information versus data governance, I would not get too hung up on that one. There is so much ambiguities. They’re so close to being synonyms that I wouldn’t get hung up on that at all and almost read them as synonyms.
When it comes to general business governance, that is more. I think of that as more policy and procedure adherence. Adherence to policy and procedure than it is looking at the evidence of procedural break. So, data or information is evidence or knowledge about procedural break in that construct. And so, then it’s more into the change management. “How do you change?”
So, I would look at data and information governance can be synonyms. They are often treated as synonyms.
Business governance is more around policy and procedure and adherence to policy and procedure and leading into change management. Now both of these can operate within change management and this is where reinvention, modernization, business transformation, all these things come in which is changing of behavior of a business using the data and information you have and all that comes into play. I prefer looking at it from that aspect of management of change and those sorts of things and driving efficiency and then evidence of am I doing what I said I was going to do? That’s the fundamental.
Now you can come into it with regulatory compliance and different things. Which is the standard body, “That is the SEC says we must do this, therefore we must comply with that.” Well, that’s just a policy and procedure. You said you’re going to do it because you’re a public company, therefore you better do it right. That’s part of the rules of being a public company. That’s only the tip of the iceberg really when you think about it from an efficiency point of view is if a group of people all do something the same and they’ve got a policy and procedure to it, how do you know they’re all doing the same and I want them to do it much the same because I want to be able to hire another person to that group. If they all do it the same, then it’s much quicker to bring that person up to speed than it is if they all do it differently.
Alexis
Yes.
Data Dave
So, that’s when this adherence to policy and procedure is important because it can drive efficiency. And that’s what we’re really looking for and looking for that within data governance, within information governance, and within business governments. We’re looking for that. “Are we doing what we said we were going to do? Does our data look like we said it was going to look like? Is our information appropriate for the audience that’s going to receive it, and are we doing what we said we were going to do?”
Alexis
Perfect. I think that’s a good wrap up to that idea. I will likely continue to use them interchangeably. It’s unlikely that I will be able to fix myself now that we’ve had this conversation. But listeners out there, if I do use one incorrectly, I would love for you to call me out, leave us a comment, send me an email, let me know that I’ve messed something up. That’ll be wonderful and hilarious.
I said it earlier, I’ll say it again. Please submit your questions to us. We would love to answer them on the podcast. Our email is talktech3clarity.com.
Dave, before we go, anything else?
Data Dave
No, I think that’s good. And I use them interchangeably, and I allow people use them interchangeably with me. If anybody wants to dispute that or have a conversation with us about that, we certainly can. Just following the practicality of it. I don’t think they’re that different.
Alexis
Totally agree. Totally agree. All right, well, thank you Dave for being with me today. I appreciate your time, and everyone have a great day.
Data Dave
Thank you. Thank you, Alexis. Have a fabulous day.
