In this blog I interview Patrick Dewald.  Patrick is a Data Governance Architect and founding partner in Diaku.  He has a wealth of experience designing Master Data Management and Data Governance solutions for financial institutions. Patrick has been heading up Data Governance initiatives, designing and implementing group-wide data services from the ground up for the best part of 15 years. Patrick is recognised by his peers as a leader in the field of Data Governance.

For this Data Governance Interview I am delighted that Sunil Soares agreed to answer my questions. Sunil is the founder and managing partner of Information Asset, LLC, www.information-asset.com a consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations build out their data governance programs. Prior to this role, Sunil was the Director of Information Governance at IBM, and worked with clients across six continents and multiple industries. Sunil is the author of multiple books including The IBM Data Governance Unified Process, Selling Information Governance to the Business and Big Data Governance.

I am very lucky. I love my job.  I get real satisfaction helping people implement data governance frameworks and improving the quality of their data. It’s great to see the huge benefits that my clients achieve. Over the years I’ve realised that every single data governance implementation, I have been involved with has started from a “standard” or “best practice” framework. But it practice it has to be tweaked or amended to fit the culture of each and every organisation. Failure to do so will inevitably result in a less than successful implementation.

I'm thrilled that my next interview is with Daragh O Brien who runs a boutique consulting practice, Castlebridge Associates, specializing in Data Governance, Information Quality, Data Protection, and general Information Strategy.  Daragh has been a great inspiration to me and has also provided me valuable support while growing my own Data Governance business, for which I'm very grateful.

I wanted to write another Christmas themed blog this year, but I have been extremely busy working on some exciting new initiatives which you will hear more about in the new year. But given that I had great feedback to this blog last year and I have many new followers who will not have read it, I have decided to repost A Data Christmas Carol...

For the third in my series of Data Governance interviews, I am really pleased that Jim Orr kindly agreed to answer my questions. I was lucky enough to meet Jim at the MDM and Data Governance Summit in London earlier this year.

Now, data definitions are something I feel very strongly about (and I think you would be very surprised if I said otherwise). After all how can we hope to govern or manage our data, if we don't even know what it is supposed to mean? So at the appropriate point in every data governance initiative, I get the Data Stewards and Data Owners to start drafting and approving definitions for the data which they own. Now this sounds easy, but you would be surprised how difficult it can be to actually put into practice. I've been to many lengthy workshops to try to define what "customer" means and there's been some painful sessions trying to agree whether "products" and "services" were the same thing...