I recently had the privilege of conducting interviews with Shahnaaz Nazerali-Larsen, a strategic leader driving transformation in Data Management and Governance for global organizations.
She is an amazingly wise person and a brilliant leader. Our conversations were inspiring, which is why I wanted to document and share some of her key insights from The Data Governance Podcast here.
People, Culture, and Data
“Data governance is not only about data, but also people and culture.”
“How culture shapes behavior, this is true for data management topics. An organization’s culture shapes how its data’s practices are executed, it influences the employee’s behavior to its data, in exactly the same way as a culture shapes people’s behaviors.”
“Doing data governance…you need to govern the people, and it is about changing the organization, changing the behaviors of these people, so that you capture the good data, the right data, to enable the business profit.”
→ Data governance, how? Not only working with data, but also changing the organization and the people, to affect the workflow of how data is generated and captured … so that you can capture the good data, and eventually enabling the business profit.
The Value of Trusted Data
“The most challenging part, is to convince the executive leadership that data governance matters. Data needs focus and control, as other assets, like financial, etc.”
“You can simply not get reliable AI outcomes, from unreliable data. And all the leaders want AI, want its benefits.”
“Everyone wants the benefits of good data, of AI, of automation, things like that, but very few want to adjust the behaviors of the ways of working that creates trusted data in the first place.”
→ Good AI outcomes come from good data, good data comes from optimization of how the data is created, this requires changing the behaviors of working.
Where Governance Lives
“Start with the fundamentals.”
“Data management is fundamentally about changing.”
“Because I strongly believe that if you understand people and data, you will be at the heart of where governance is handling.”