If you’ve worked in Data Governance for any amount of time, there will have been a time when a client or employer told you to be pragmatic. Hell, you may have used the term yourself. I sure know I have. But lately, I have come to dislike the word and avoid it like the plague.

Words and smells

If you look for people’s experiences with Evernote, a lot of the content you find focuses on either the organization of notes, notebooks and stack. Many others complain about the slow progress in improving the editor. Another discursive thread is the price of the product. Of course, as with all software, there is no lack of people discussing alternatives to Evernote which supposedly solve all of its problems.

My take is that many people focus on the wrong things when they evaluate Evernote. Obviously, this is just my personal perspective. I’ve never been interested that much in creating fancy notes…

The tools-people-process triangle is a triangle for a reason.

It is fashionable among data governance consultants to imply that data governance is a purely organizational issue and that it does not require tools. While it is true that the organizational challenges (i.e. the people and process corners of the triangle) are important, for any but the most basic data governance activities, some form of tooling is required.

Frankly, I feel like crying when I hear colleagues say that you can “do data governance” in Excel. For a small decade, and longer if you count the efforts by BI practitioners, we…

My mother would probably say that I’m one of the most disorganized people in the world. I’m sure she has a point, although I’ve been working on it for the last few years. In my quest to become more organized, often forced to trying to juggle professional and personal commitments, I’ve been using a wide array of systems and tools to achieve the Promised Land of Productivity and Organization.

At first, I was heavily focused on digital tools. After all, I’ve always been interested in technology, so this made sense. Off the top of my head, I’ve used the following…

As data governance specialists and consultants, we tend to think that data governance is at the forefront of everybody’s mind. After all, we are intimately familiar with the costs and risks associated with not governing data well. The harsh reality is that most of the business does not care about data governance at all, and if they do care, they are generally worried it will impact their work in a negative way.

Data quality is important. Everything starts with properly defining business terms. Data should be managed as an asset. Anyone who has done any work in the data governance…