THE DATA GOVERNANCE COUNTRY – Full Chapter (free)
Paul Jones
Strategic Data & AI Leader @ Baringa ?? CDO ?? Consultant ?? Author ?? Speaker
Your Data Governance Country needs you!
In this Data Country, the people are data. The data people each have their own individual characteristics: some are highly skilled and work in productive jobs that contribute to the economy and society; others may be less qualified but perform tasks that are totally essential to the running of the country; some are entrepreneurs that take steps to innovate and generate new value through business. There are also some who are less useful and make fewer contributions to the Data Governance Country. Worse, there are a small minority of data people who are corrupt and dishonest; who appear to be one thing but are something entirely different and drive chaos, disruption and misery for the wider population. Usually these sorry data souls exist because they’ve been neglected and lost touch with their reason for existing.
The country is vast and rapidly growing, with a population of over a billion data people and counting. The faster the population grows, the more economic and social value can be generated; but at the same time, the spread of resources to look after the data people and get the best out of them diminishes, resulting in an ever greater chance for corruption and poverty.
When the Data Governance Country was young, it was so much easier for the data people to get along and to be productive and happy together. They were so few in numbers, it made collaboration simple, and it was easy to spot the bad apples and deal with them quickly, so that corruption was stamped out before it could take root. Everyone knew each other, everyone knew what role each data person played in their little society and everyone could coordinate their efforts and play their part in a happy, healthy data environment.
Now that the data country is so big, it’s not so easy to keep a handle on things. There is a lack of order, a lack of efficiency, and as a result, many data people are suffering and are unable to play their most productive role for the country.
Just like any country, a government has been established to run things and to help the data people to live better, happier, more productive lives.
You are the Head of the new Data Government, and you have quite a task ahead of you…
The Winning Data Governance Manifesto
You are the Leader of the Data Excellence Party, which has just been appointed as the new government of the Data Country, based on the promises that were made for a better future. When you took over as leader for the party, before you started campaigning, you worked with your leadership team to develop a manifesto that outlined the policies that would be proposed to address the priorities of the data people.
In recent years, economic output has dropped, crime is up, health issues are rising, the population is aging but less productive; and businesses are struggling to innovate and grow. Urgent change is needed.
In order to develop a manifesto that really resonated with the data population and clearly talked to their passions and priorities, you directed the Data Excellence Party to conduct a range of surveys and public engagement exercises to get to the bottom of the issues that are affecting people. Based on this research, a manifesto could be compiled to incorporate a set of policies and budgets, which are all aimed at tackling the issues that data people were talking about, including:
The manifesto was revolutionary and led to a landslide victory. It was really clear in the way it explained how each policy would meet widely accepted problems in a practical way.
The other thing that really built credibility with data voters throughout the campaign, was the way your party acknowledged that it would be through the coordinated implementation of all of these policies, not any one individual solution in isolation, which would be the key to delivering transformational improvements across the data country. Everyone knows that doing one thing on its own won’t work: success will depend on a well-orchestrated combination of improvements.
Your party also made it clear that success would depend on the willing participation and active engagement of data people across the country. No single one of these initiatives would work on their own, and none of them would work without data people’s involvement… but together, with faith and determination, there is a glimmer of hope that this could be the chance that the data country has been waiting for: a chance of a better future and renewed prosperity for all.
Government, Not Management
It’s an amazing victory to win power, but you know that you and your party have signed up to a massive challenge and expectations are high. You also know that you’re going to need to make full use of the powers that the Data Government has to influence large-scale change. In order to do this, it’s important to know how Data Governance works.
For starters, you know that a Data Government “governs” its data people, it doesn’t “manage” them.
Each data person has their own data life, being born into a data family and performing various tasks and activities throughout their lives until their purpose is fulfilled and they expire. Most of these data people don’t work for the government, they have their own jobs and businesses and other enterprises. As such, most data people can’t be treated like employees or civil servants: they need to be allowed to have a sufficient level of freedom to be able to fulfil their duties, keep healthy and live happy, productive lives.?
So, before you get started, let’s review what your Data Government is able to do, so you can develop a strategy for implementing your party’s manifesto.
In simple terms, the tasks that your government can perform, can be summarised as the following four key things:
Let’s take a simple example to illustrate this.
The roads of your Data Country are heavily congested, which is making it difficult for people to get to work and causes massive frustration amongst the data population.
So, you could set a new policy about congestion levels and pass a law about variable speed limits on key roads, with a target to decrease congestion during peak hours by 20% and increase the satisfaction of data people in their journeys by 10%. These are your new policies, laws and targets.
Once you’ve set the new laws, you need to communicate them. The communications need to go out to different audiences in different ways: your data police force need to understand the new laws and how they need to enforce them, so they can be issued formal communications via official channels; the data public need to know what they need to do differently, so they can be engaged via a combination of letters and other media such as TV, radio and adverts on the web; and civil servants working for your data government need to know how they will engage with the public on these new laws and how they will monitor them, so could be provided with briefings through a communications cascade down the government chain of command.
Following the communication of the new rules, it’s important to monitor their fulfilment, in relation to the targets that have been set. You’ll need baseline data from before the publication of the rules, to be able to monitor changes from then to now. Then you can look at differences over time, to see if your policies are having the desired effect or not. You need to have a clearly defined way of measuring these things both initially and on an ongoing basis, to be able to do this reliably and meaningfully.
Finally, you need to enforce the new rules. How you do so will depend on the type of rule and how important and urgent it is. Will breaking the rules lead to a fine? Or will they lead to a removal of the rights of data people to work until they’ve resolved the problem that they’ve caused by breaking the rules? Or will you follow a more positive approach, rewarding people to following the rules rather than punishing non-compliance? You need to work out how you’ll make sure your rules are adopted and policed, to be able to roll them out effectively.
All of the above need careful consideration and planning before they’re implemented, to ensure they deliver the best possible outcomes. You need to consider questions such as: how will the communication, monitoring and enforcement happen? When you roll the changes out, will you follow a “carrot” approach and sell the benefits so people want to comply, or a “stick” approach and warn about the sanctions associated with non-compliance? Will you need more civil servants to be able to track the data and more police to enforce the new rules? Will all of this work be coordinated centrally, or via local data councils? How will the changes be funded? Will there be central funding made available to support local implementation, or will data people be expected to pick up the costs themselves?
There are quite a number of factors to think about, and this will be the case for each and every policy you decide to implement.
This basic structure of setting rules, communicating them, tracking compliance and enforcing them, is the same pattern that is followed for most aspects of government. The extent to which it’s done centrally or locally, how closely it’s tracked and how firmly the rules are enforced may all vary, depending on the types of data people affected and the types of rules; but this framework can be used to drive large-scale improvements across a large data population.
OK, now you’re clear on this, time to apply the framework to the policies in your manifesto…
Missing data people, data crime and data corruption
Your first priority is addressing Data Crime. The data people that participated in your party’s surveys unanimously agreed that this was the number one problem. Corruption is rife and spreading, and innocent data people are going missing or being injured as they’re affected by, or caught in the crossfire of, various criminal activities. Data people are becoming fearful and are less confident going out and doing their jobs. There are stories of good data people doing their best to do the right thing but delivering damagingly poor results because they’ve been corrupted without even realising it.
Before tackling enforcement of the law, you need to straighten out the law itself. The Data Country’s legal system has evolved over many years and has become confused and inconsistent. There are now crimes taking place, for which no laws have ever been developed, so in some cases it’s no wonder there is so much discontent amongst the data population. It makes it hard for data people to understand and equally difficult for the data police to interpret and enforce.
As the leader of the Data Excellence Party, you can use the mandate obtained through the recent landslide election, to introduce sweeping reforms. You propose a new, simplified structure for the written laws, starting with high level, easy to understand definitions, then drilling down into detailed technical definitions that can be used to implement them in practice. You place a particular emphasis on helping missing data people, given how widespread a problem it is, before dealing with other more specialist types of data corruption.
The new laws receive a mixed response. Some data people criticise the increased level of scrutiny that they’ll be placed under and complain about the impact on their rights and freedoms. Others welcome the changes, praising the clarity and focus on helping those in need.
Whether the updated laws will have the desired impact or not will depend on the way that they are rolled out and upheld. Under your direction, the Data Government instigates a large-scale, multi-media communications campaign, explaining the new rules that people need to follow, with a strong emphasis on the benefits to them and their lives. Data people will be safer. Data corruption will come down. Everyone will be able to fulfil their purpose in life more confidently.
Next, you need to work out how these new rules will be enforced. Various local police forces have existed for some time, but they’re scattered across the land and inconsistent in the way they operate and their effectiveness. Some, mainly in the more affluent areas, are well funded and have plenty of data police officers to uphold the peace. Others have been neglected and have staff that are untrained, so don’t even really know what they’re supposed to be doing.
In order to coordinate a cross-Country set of improvements, you establish a new, central Strategic Data Police team, with authority over all localised data police forces. Some of the more established and effective data police forces are initially sceptical and resistant to this idea, but they are given an opportunity to become leading members of a wider police community, sharing their best practices and working together to drive improvements at a scale that they could never have achieved on their own, which seems to dramatically improve the levels of uptake and support for this new way of working.
To ensure there is a workforce to match the new levels of work, investments are made into new staff, additional training, and new ways of monitoring crime consistently across all parts of the Data Country. For the first time, you will be able to accurately communicate crime levels and use this to both show improvements and to derive insights that will enable targeted investigation and enforcement operations, where they’re most needed.
The Data Country’s turnaround has started. You know it’s only the beginning: crime will always exist and your legal system will always need to adapt and evolve with changes in data markets, technologies and culture, which will all drive changes in the data population and its behaviour. The difference is, you now have the foundations in place. The laws are clear. You have a way of monitoring and enforcing them, which you can adjust based on fluctuations in different crime levels and based on the impact that your interventions are having.
While this has all been progressing, your government has also been working on the data people’s second priority…
Data health crisis: is prevention better than a cure?
Public health levels have been deteriorating over many years and the problems seem to be accelerating towards a crisis. Data diseases are spreading; data quality health issues are widespread and worsening; and this is all leading to inactivity, which is further impacting data people’s health.
Data people need to be well in order to be productive. If they’re not productive, it impacts the economy and leads to a range of other unexpected knock-on impacts. Unemployment levels increase, leading to poverty and increased costs for the government. Also, the health service in the Data Country is largely funded by the government, so the more people that are sick, the more budget needs to be put aside to support it.
The first thing most people think about when talking about healthcare is the hospitals and specialist care for injuries and serious diseases. However, one thing that came across clearly in your party’s engagement with the public, was that local engagement is an area that’s currently really weak.
You know that pouring money into the hospitals will only increase capacity to deal with symptoms once they’ve got so bad they need higher levels of care. It won’t address the wider public health emergency that is clearly developing across the country.
In order to develop a strategy, you bring together top experts from across the country, with knowledge of the challenges faced in each area and the key health problems that are causing the most issues. To your surprise, a lot of the issues are to do with bad habits that data people have adopted in their day-to-day lives. If they behaved differently and stopped being so lazy in the way that they do their jobs and keep their data homes tidy, there would be a dramatic improvement in data health, resulting in a decreased need for use of hospital and other emergency health services.
In response to this expert advice, a public health campaign is launched to explain the benefits of healthier living and to encourage data people to behave in better ways, to decrease the likelihood of them becoming injured or sick. Also, new laws are drafted to place responsibilities on employers to ensure their data employees are kept safe and encouraged to behave appropriately at work.
In addition to these measures, data doctors in local communities are provided with more funding to enable them to support the implementation of the new public health guidance and reduce the burden on the big hospitals and more centralised services.
Central health services have received the lion’s share of funding and support over previous years. The hope is that through the implementation of new, more localised data health strategy, that the strain on these central services will reduce. However, for now, they are still needed more than ever and the key enhancement made to their role is to play a stronger part in coordinating the efforts across local authorities and collating information on the impact of these efforts, so that they can be tracked at an aggregate level across the Country and decisions can be made on the prioritisation of efforts and resources.
It doesn’t take long for this new approach to have an effect. The simple act of educating the public on how to look after their own data health almost immediately results in an improvement in the quality of many data people’s lives. Hospital admissions are starting to fall and public opinion of the Data Excellence party is strengthening by the day.
The next priority is a bit of a controversial one. It’s linked to health, but something about health that is a bit of a unique issue for data people…
Dealing with the Living Dead
Unlike organic lifeforms, data people can live for a very long time and even once they’ve died, their bodies don’t waste away to nothing. They continue to exist, in the exact state that they were, until action is taken to deal with them. An even more unusual thing about deceased data people, is that sometimes they can be mistaken for living data and can be brought back to be used for the purpose that they existed for when they were alive, resulting in all kinds of unintended consequences. Data ghosts don’t mean to be disruptive, but unless their metadata status has been changed once they’ve passed away, they don’t have any way of knowing they’re dead themselves, so just dutifully do whatever it is they think they should do, which can lead to very unfortunate outcomes for the data businesses that are employing them.
Data zombies still incur costs, and the money’s got to come from somewhere. Often, they are left lying alone in their data homes, which still need their bills paying, even if the data people don’t need the heating or electricity anymore.
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The thing is, moving deceased data people to data archive morgues or to data deletion crematoriums, costs money in itself, and no-one wants to pay it, even though the cost of keeping them where they are very quickly increases to a point where it exceeds the cost of dealing with them properly and humanely in the first place.
The central government has a massive pension fund set aside, which is used to cover the ongoing cost of data people who aren’t productive any more but need to be supported in their old homes. This is clearly a cost that needs to be addressed, not least to avoid the increasing number of reported data poltergeists, terrorising workplaces and causing all kinds of mayhem.
In order to address this, as with all other aspects of government, the first step is to develop some rules, which can be communicated and enforced. Under the new rules, all data people, throughout their lives, must regularly report their metadata life status to the government, based on a set of new, published criteria.
Once a data person has passed to a point where they are no longer actively working, they must be assessed to determine whether they are ever likely to be needed in the future, or if they have truly expired and are no longer living, breathing data with a purpose. Depending on this assessment, the data person will either be moved to a data archive retirement home, which is based outside of the towns and cities and is generally far cheaper than needing to cover the full costs of their active data residence; or they will be sent to be humanely dealt with at a data deletion crematorium.
Some businesses are worried about this. The most common concern that you hear is: “What if we need the data people again at some point in the future?” This is where the assessment criteria become important: there’s no problem with data people being sustained in whatever data archive residence is appropriate for them, if there’s a good reason to do so, and this could mean many years after their active duties have been completed. However, the new rules state that it is not permissible to sustain data people indefinitely, unless they are likely to be actively used again in the future. Different types of data people may need to be kept in a condition that would enable them to work for longer than others, but only with a clear purpose. Otherwise, there’s no excuse for incurring the ongoing costs and it’s unfair on the data people themselves, who deserve to rest in peace!
The new policies related to reducing the dependency on state pensions and increasing the number of funerals is initially controversial and resisted. However, you decide to shift the cost of ongoing maintenance to local Data Councils rather than the central government. This is initially even more unpopular, but quickly drives a very different set of behaviours. When the cost lands with the local councils, they start seeking opportunities to reduce the amount of time data people are sustained for, beyond their active working lives, which leads to an increase in data people being archived and cremated.
No matter what people’s views are on these new policies, there is no doubt that the reduction in inactive data people frees up money and resources to spend on other, more important areas requiring investment. There’s also a decrease in the mis-use of deceased data people, resulting in far fewer negative outcomes for companies.
When you have time, you might sit back and reflect on this. Sometimes, just because a policy is unpopular, doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do. In this case, holding your nerve against the negative public opinion, is resulting in positive outcomes for the country; and as the results of these changes start to shine through, it won’t be long before public opinion shifts in your favour again.
In the meantime, you need to make sure you’re making progress on your next policy…
Developing data people for the future
Now you’ve made progress on the “defensive” policies, which protect your data population from harm and reduce corruption and injury, you can start to move to policies that will drive real value.
Data people are only valuable when they’re put to work; and the more sophisticated the work they’re used for, the more value they can drive. The more value they drive, the more money they make and the better it is for your Data Country’s economy.
The thing is, as with all people, data people need to be educated to build the skills they need to drive value. Without good education, they’ll just sit there with a lot of latent value but won’t actually do anything.
Fortunately, there is a basic education system that’s already in place for your Data Country, so you have something to build on. However, the subjects that are taught are mostly very superficial and aren’t empowering the data workforce with knowledge and skills that will enable them to compete with data people in other countries.
Your party initiates a new education programme, which sets a curriculum and target grades for schools and education service providers. This programme covers:
The idea behind structuring the education programme this way, is to target different audiences with relevant messages, which will increase their understanding and drive improvements to their productivity and the value they deliver for themselves and the economy.
Now you run into a problem… your budget is starting to look very stretched. The trouble is, you know that getting education right is absolutely fundamental to making your Data Country more productive and more competitive. You’ve got to be able to do something about it, but you also still need enough money to support the delivery of your other policies. Also, education is one of those things that doesn’t pay off immediately, which means some are reluctant to invest in it: it will take time to upskill data people and start seeing the benefits; but the longer you delay investment in it, the longer it will take to see the payoff, so it’s best to start early, even if you have to start small.
After a discussion with the minister in charge of the data government’s treasury, you agree a way forward. The basic data literacy will be fully funded by the government. That will mean that the broadest population of people will be provided with basic data skills, which will improve their ability to deliver value and also provide the foundations for them to build their skills and expertise further.
When it comes to targeted education for data people who build new things, and for data people managers, these topics will form part of the mandatory curriculum for data literacy, but there’s limited funding available beyond this, so further education will receive some minimal subsidisation. You’d like to be able to do more, and in future years, once the other policies have really made some traction, maybe you’ll be able to, but this is all you can afford at this time.
Finally, the higher education institutions will be encouraged to seek private funding for research and for more advanced courses, plus you’ll also look into options for further funding for this, as part of the “business and innovation” policy, so there should still be some opportunities to invest and stimulate opportunities in the future.
Data people need to be able to travel
By the time you get to your transport and infrastructure policy, your budget is nearly spent. You’ve rightly prioritised the policies that will help directly improve your data population’s standard of living and set them up for healthier, happier, safer and more productive lives, but when you get to the stage where everyone is well educated, how are they going to get to the new jobs where they’re going to be able to deliver this enhanced value?
The more valuable data people become, the higher the demand for their services, and the more they need to travel to be used in different places. In fact, in many cases, data people can’t do any work at all until they’ve travelled somewhere, so transport is absolutely critical.
Fortunately, your Minister for Transport and Infrastructure has an idea. Whereas most of your other policies depend on central government funding, raised through taxes, the new idea is to develop proposals for a series of strategic infrastructure projects and to invite businesses to invest in them.?
For this first year, to get things started, the proposal that you’ll ask companies to bid for, will be for a new business development on the outskirts of Master Data City, and a series of new high-speed roads connecting key towns to the development. It could be a highly lucrative investment for any investor and will enable your government to start making visible progress against this policy. Admittedly, it won’t represent quite the scale or pace of change that you’d promised in your manifesto, but it will be a start.
Is there any money left for innovation?
Your ministers have held some budget back for your final policy area, at your request. You know that, even though the defensive policies are critical to focus on first, if you don’t show your voters that you’re delivering some things that are really, visibly moving the country forward, they’re going to complain.?
Whilst some innovation won’t possible without the foundations being in place, it’s still important to foster a culture of innovation and forward thinking, which is something that can be done even with older data infrastructure. Also, by doing this, it means the country will be more likely to be ready to really take advantage of the new skills and capabilities of its population and improved infrastructure, when they come to fruition.
But you don’t have much money to play with, so what will you do?
Once again, it’s one of your ministers who comes forward with the ideas. The first idea is to setup a kind of competition, to win grants to deliver new, innovative, value-driving capabilities. This way, the budget can be broken into chunks and can be invested in the best of the business ideas that are put forward. Taking this approach should maximise the chances of a positive return on investment and also generate buzz in the business community, which could lead to other new enterprises as a positive side-effect, without needing to invest in them as well.
The remainder of the funds will then be used for a series of workshops, aimed at data entrepreneurs and businesses, to raise awareness and encourage the business community to drive more innovation.
Once again, this isn’t the level of investment that you’d hoped for, but it’s a start, and in future years it’ll be something that can be built on.
You just hope that what you’re doing will be enough…
Second thoughts
Now you’ve set things in motion across all aspects of your manifesto, you look back over your decisions. There’s no doubt that the ways that you’ve invested and prioritised changes to laws and enforcement of those laws will drive positive change, but the low levels of investment in transport and infrastructure are bothering you. Have you made the right priority call?
Only time will tell, but at least you know that you made the best decisions you could have made with the information available at the time, so couldn’t have done any better than that. No point in worrying about unknown unknowns: it’s time to get on with governing your country!
Actively governing
It’s great to finally be in a place where your manifesto has been translated into real, well defined and funded pieces of work, which are now being driven by the various branches of government that have been entrusted with responsibility to deliver the work.
Now it’s all running, it’s time for you to step away from the detail and into a proper “governing” role.
You’ve already established clear accountability for each aspect of your manifesto, with a single minister appointed to each policy area. They each report into you, so you establish a series of regular meetings with them to obtain updates and to provide them with leadership and support.
Each minister is responsible for establishing their own local governance arrangements, through whatever structures they deem to be most appropriate, and you do not get involved unless you’re asked to. There are a number of sub-committees that you’re occasionally invited to attend, but you generally don’t need to get too involved.
In order to establish oversight and to coordinate efforts across all policy areas, you establish a new Central Data Government Council, which meets to review progress against all of the new policies, laws and targets. In this council, you summon the ministers responsible for each area and request that they provide updates, then use the council to discuss and agree what needs to be done to provide help where required.
Discussions in your council are often quite high level, but the metrics and regular deep-dives into specific content areas provide you with a level of comfort that the right things are being done, and provides early warning of areas that need more attention and might need interventions to get back on track.
Only the beginning
You know that this is all only the beginning. Your Data Country has got itself into such a bad state, it’s going to take a lot more work than your data population realises to get to a better place, and it’ll be a while before you can start to really maximise the value of your data people.
Having said that, you’re on the journey and taking those first, important steps. There will no doubt be a range of challenges that you’ll face on the way, but your data population are counting on you and the great team that you’ve assembled. With the strong focus you’ve placed on the things that matter most to people, you’re confident that you’re on the path to a totally rejuvenated data economy and data society…
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Lesson 2:
Data Governance is like running a country. It’s crucial to successfully steer a wide range of inter-connected activities that involve a lot of people, and requires experienced leadership, clear communication and coordination, to optimise the value delivered using finite resources.
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