Memo from the CEO: Announcing Data Governance Workgroups!

Mar 22, 2012 by Jill Dyché in Data Governance, Data Management

In which Jill re-publishes one executive’s plans to kick-start data governance.

To: Executive Team, VPs, and Directors

From: Your CEO

Subj: Data Governance Workgroup Announcements

As the Chief Executive Officer of this esteemed company, many of you have explained to me –some of you multiple times a day—that data is a strategic asset. I get it. Really I do. Thanks already.

Due to your unremitting tenacity, last year I approved funding for an enterprise data governance effort that encompasses every organization and its data needs. The good news about this initiative is that it started with a bang! Congratulations to everyone involved!

The bad news is that nothing’s happened. I have been briefed about research projects and a pending roadmap by the Data Governance Steering Committee. But no one can actually offer any concrete examples of value. While I applaud your efforts to stay within budget by ordering take-out from Babe’s Backyard BBQ – best slaw anywhere, if you ask me! – I’d like to see more progress.

So herewith I am announcing that Gretchen McPhee has been charged with heading up the Data Governance Planning Finalization Workgroup. Gretchen has a pulse and her blood oxygen level is a healthy 93, so she’s imminently qualified for this role. I look forward to working with Gretchen personally to ensure that all data governance planning has concluded and that we actually have one or more plans in place.

I’m also thrilled to announce that Pat Fitzpatrick will be heading up the Data Governance Committee Formation Subcommittee. While the current Data Governance Steering Committee has done a stellar job of holding meetings – let me once again credit the nice folks at Babe’s – the committee will be retiring in the interest of forming a more robust decision making body. I thank those of you on the existing Steering Committee for your hard work, and ask that you be available to participate in the Subcommittee if so called.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Freebase Consulting for their hard work in kicking off data governance planning. Freebase has a long history here of being recommended by a vendor only to suggest a competing vendor and then blog about how kludgy their software is. I like these guys, and plan on retaining them for our pending initiative, More Morale Now! Until then, please do not remove any chairs from their cubicles.

Finally I would like to announce our new Big Data initiative. Since data is a strategic asset, I figure that the more data we have the more strategic we can be.  The guys at Freebase have briefed me on Big Data, and they say our data is among the biggest!  There’s a flood of data out there. It’s like data avalanche like many, many buckets of data that would reach to the moon if they were all full of data. That’s high! So I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Ted Bradley in his new role as Big Data Planning and Research Workgroup Coordinator Chair. Good luck, Ted!

In closing I’d like to thank you all for your dedication to our company’s data. And thanks especially to the guys at Freebase. Baby backs at Babe’s on me!

Tags: big data, Data Governance, Data Management, data strategy, Extreme Data, Extreme Information, grid arrays, Hadoop, in memory databases, mapreduce, NoSQL