While researching for my Data Governance fairy story blogs, I enlisted the help of one of my god daughters and when riffling through one of her fairy tale books I came across a story for which it is easy to see the analogy with the real world activity of identifying the correct people to be Data Stewards or Data Owners. Anyone who has tried to do this knows that it is rarely an easy task. When reading the Princess and The Pea, by Hans Christian Andersen, I was struck as to how the solution to the problem is the same. It’s all a question of sensitivity….

Continuing my Data Governance Fairy Stories theme, in this blog I'm going to examine two further characters which you may have come across.  Whereas Data Fairies are helpful (but don't forget that their existence, if you believe in them, doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to understand how your data really does get from A to B), Data Goblins and Data Hobgoblins are troublesome creatures and whether you believe in them or not, they represent a very real threat to your data governance and data quality initiatives.

The feedback and response I got to my last blog got me thinking about Data Governance Fairy Stories and whether there was room for me to be to the Data Management world what the Grimm Brothers are to children's literature. I rapidly came to the conclusion that the answer was probably not, but that perhaps I could do a series of blogs on the theme. 

Picture the scene: you arrive at work bright and early, switch on your pc and settle down to do some important work confident that the data you need will be ready and waiting for you.  But I have a question for you:  Do you know how that data gets there and where is comes from?

To quote Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet "What's in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet."

You don’t have to have studied Romeo and Juliet at school, seen the play or even have read it, to know the saying “a rose by any other name…”. As with many Shakespearean quotes this one gets used in our everyday lives and if you’ve been reading my previous blogs, you will be starting to pick up on the fact that I often view the world through data governance tinted spectacles.

 After an incredible (and frankly quite unbelievable) accident at home recently, I have found myself struggling to find firstly the time to write a blog and then more recently the inspiration. That is until a conversation with my sister piqued my interest. Being a civil engineer, when we discuss her work we rarely (unfortunately for me) stray into the realms of data governance, but she was telling me about an excellent blog published internally within her company, which has got them all talking about whether they are “blue tits” or “robins”.

The adage a picture is worth a thousand words is popularly attributed to Confucius, but according to Wikipedia was born much more recently: "It is believed that the modern use of the phrase stems from an article by Fred R. Barnard in an advertising trade journal, in 1921, promoting the use of images in advertisements". Whatever the source, one thing that is certain is that when the saying was first used, no one was thinking about Data Governance! But they easily could have been...

So I've been blogging for four months now and I've had great feedback, but I had one of those light bulb moments during a conversation with my best friend recently.  It turns out that my friends and family still don't know what it is I do!