Join next week’s Data Management Summit for the Low-Down on Data Governance

Data governance, lineage and quality are in the spotlight at next week’s A-Team Group Data Management Summit in New York City, with discussion expected to focus on progress, regulatory impact, strategic approaches and the potential benefits of a strong data governance framework beyond regulatory compliance.

Michael Vapenik, enterprise data governance officer at American Express, will moderate a panel session during the Summit that will cover these issues and answer your questions. Vapenik will be joined on the panel by Ellen Gentile, assistant vice president, data quality and data steward at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation; Sue Habas, vice president of strategic technologies – data intelligence at ASG Technologies; Catherine Louisy-Louis, senior vice president, director, Americas data governance at Mizuho Americas; and Nathan Snyder, partner at Brickendon Consulting.

We caught up with Snyder ahead of the Data Management Summit, to get a flavour of Brickendon Consulting’s approach to data governance, which favours change from a top-down to a data consumer approach to governance.

Snyder explains: “Looking at regulations and data in terms of difficulties around ownership, stewarding and mastering tends to ignore how data is used across an organisation. We take a more data consumer focussed view as there is no value in mastering data, but there is value in distributing it for use. If consumers own some data governance, this can also help their understanding of data quality.”

Data lineage can also be improved with a consumer view, which also moves data governance closer to meeting business needs. Snyder says that if data governance is driven by data architects and internal standards, it may not be very useful for data consumers working to meet business needs. Instead, he suggests: “Data governance needs to be about relationship management and engaging with groups of consumers to meet their requirements and understanding of data. By promoting a holistic view of data to consumers, they can feed back on what needs to be changed.”