Connect Four and Data Governance

Connect Four was one of my favorite childhood games (I grew up in the early 1970s before video games and home computers).

The object of the game was to connect four of your checkers next to each other either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, before your opponent could do the same with their checkers. Hours of fun for ages 7 and up, as Milton Bradley would say.

Data Governance has its own version of Connect Four.

The central concept of data governance is its definition, implementation, and enforcement of policies, which connect four factors:

People
Business Process
Technology
Data

Data governance policies govern the complex interactions among people, business processes, technology, and data, which is a corporate asset because high quality data serves as a solid foundation for an organization’s success, empowering people, enabled by technology, to optimize business processes for superior business performance.

Connecting all four of these factors both vertically (within each business unit) and horizontally (across every business unit) is the only winning strategy for long-term success.

Data governance is not as simple (or as fun) as a board game, but if your data governance board doesn’t play Connect Four, then it could be Game Over for much more than just your data governance program: