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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Oxymorons in Abundance (continued)

Leadership is about Change.
Management is about Effectiveness and Efficiency.
Governance is about Consistency and Stability.

The discipline of Change Management is well worth our time. It consists of theory and practice involved in getting a change implemented. http://www.m2dxtx.com/images/Change_Components.gif makes an excellent reference whether you are a Manager, Governor or Leader. In everyday life, we can find ourselves in situations where there is an atmosphere of confusion around some initiative. As the chart directs, this is evidence that the vision driving the change has not been communicated well enough. In other words, the effort still needs leadership.

If the general mood is one of frustration, then this is where the manager must step in to make certain that sufficient resources are available.

To understand the role of Governance better, let's examine the life of a guerrilla movement such as the early days of our own American Revolution. The various colonies existed under charter from the King of England--not unlike departments in any corporation. As far as the Leadership was concerned, the colonies' purpose (the vision) was to produce wealth to allow expansion of the empire. The colonies were OK with that since they were able to keep a portion of the wealth for themselves.

The Leadership had placed Governors in each of the colonies to make sure that everything functioned well and that the colonist/workers could and did focus on their production. Leaders like to be able to rely on their empire to generate wealth consistently and predictably. The problem was that the Leaders and the Governors were out of touch with life at the boundaries. Governance attenuated pretty rapidly as you moved westward, away from the seaport communication links and seats of governance.

It was hard to focus on making the leaders wealthier when you had to worry about coming back from a hard day in the fields to find your home burned down and your family gone. Even a relatively small thing like an illness meant that you might have to cease all "normal" activities in favor of ministering to the ill or traveling days to either bring the ill to a physician or the physician to the ill.

In all of this people learned to manage their own situation. In so doing, they developed their own leadership and governance skills and processes. They learned to manage the processes and assessed their effectiveness by the stability they delivered. Ineffective processes were modified or abandoned.

The lesson here is that there is little need for governance in the boardroom. Governance is most valuable at the boundaries, where control is weakest. If there is no stability, no consistency and no predictability at the boundaries, then there is no governance. If Leaders attempt to hold Managers and "official" Governors accountable for something that doesn't exist, they will find themselves more and more out of touch as the accountable individuals scramble to create evidence that they are being effective.

What is data governance accountable for? What do we measure? What are the goals? What are the trends? Is business intelligence defined for data governance? Do we have data governance?

Tomorrow: Measuring Data Governance

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