Aristotle, Data Governance, and Lead Rulers
Jim Harris in Books, Data Quality tagged Best of 2011, Data Governance, Philosophy Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 9:00AM Data governance requires the coordination of a complex combination of a myriad of factors, including executive sponsorship, funding, decision rights, arbitration of conflicting priorities, policy definition, policy implementation, data quality remediation, data stewardship, business process optimization, technology enablement, and, perhaps most notably, policy enforcement.
But sometimes this emphasis on enforcing policies makes data governance sound like it’s all about rules.
In their book Practical Wisdom, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe use the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle as a guide to explain that although rules are important, what is more important is “knowing the proper thing to aim at in any practice, wanting to aim at it, having the skill to figure out how to achieve it in a particular context, and then doing it.”
Aristotle observed the practical wisdom of the craftsmen of his day, including carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and masons, noting how “their work was not governed by systematically applying rules or following rigid procedures. The materials they worked with were too irregular, and each task posed new problems.”
“Aristotle was particularly fascinated with how masons used rulers. A normal straight-edge ruler was of little use to the masons who were carving round columns from slabs of stone and needed to measure the circumference of the columns.”
Unless you bend the ruler.
“Which is exactly what the masons did. They fashioned a flexible ruler out of lead, a forerunner of today’s tape measure. For Aristotle, knowing how to bend the rule to fit the circumstance was exactly what practical wisdom was all about.”
Although there’s a tendency to ignore the existing practical wisdom of the organization, successful data governance is not about systematically applying rules or following rigid procedures, and precisely because the dynamic challenges faced, and overcome daily, by business analysts, data stewards, technical architects, and others, exemplify today’s constantly changing business world.
But this doesn’t mean that effective data governance policies can’t be implemented. It simply means that instead of focusing on who should lead the way (i.e., top-down or bottom-up), we should focus on what the rules of data governance are made of.
Well-constructed data governance policies are like lead rulers—flexible rules that empower us with an understanding of the principle of the policy, and trust us to figure out how best to enforce the policy in a particular context, how to bend the rule to fit the circumstance. Aristotle knew this was exactly what practical wisdom was all about—data governance needs practical wisdom.
“Tighter rules and regulations, however necessary, are pale substitutes for wisdom,” concluded Schwartz and Sharpe. “We need rules to protect us from disaster. But at the same time, rules without wisdom are blind and at best guarantee mediocrity.”
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Reader Comments (4)
A badly needed perspective in the data governance (and for that matter, general governance) area.
It’s all about making things work in the real world.
From the LinkedIn Group for the Data Governance Professionals Organization, Scott Delaney commented:
“A great perspective which (in my opinion) exposes one of the key reasons why data governance initiatives often fail. All too often it seems that those involved (or those sponsoring) expect that hard and fast rules are what's needed.
I wonder how much of this stems from organisational cultures where staff time is closely budgeted and monitored. A common push-back I've struck in the past is managers of potential data stewards (almost) insisting on an exact breakdown of what data governance activities their people will be working on and how long each activity will take. Add to that the desire to help out new data stewards by providing them with tools to use as they learn what their new role involves and a situation where the rules and their strict application come to the fore can quickly emerge!
Perhaps we've a lot more education and awareness work to do generally around data governance still.”
I guess I stopped at Aristotle's Categories and did not look further into Aristotle's great work, amazing how he was able to see things so clearly but then again perhaps it was a less complicated world and easier to see its fundamental inner workings. It is nice to learn the origin of the phrase "bending the rule" although what it means today is clearly different. In the Aristotle example bending the rule did not change the intended purpose of the rule, which was to measure distance. Today's understanding would be to use the ruler as a defensive or offensive weapon.
In the development of the ISO standards for data quality we had to fight an uphill battle against the data modelers who had a vision of a singularity where everything would be required to comply with a grand theoretical model where everything was exactly defined. In the end we prevailed and defined the principles of how data quality should be achieved; Quality data should have a syntax, Quality data should contain explicit semantics and Quality data should meet specified requirements. This left open the method of achieving these objectives. ISO 22745 took the pragmatic path relying on terminology rather than the more terse data models. The key to ISO 22745 and to ISO 8000 is the recognition of the importance of the dynamic nature of data requirements and therefore the lack of an absolute or "standard" model.
ISO 22745-30 simply provides a way to express data requirements in an application processable form (xml), it is the instructions for building a ruler that you can then use to measure data quality. These are the rules that did not change as the ruler was bent to measure the columns. Data governance clearly needs a structured environment if it is to be effective but also it must be flexible enough to accommodate business requirements and it must recognize the dynamic nature of business - the reality is that things change.
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