New course
I recently facilitated a new Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) short course called Data Governance for Leaders, for the first time. I developed this course based on my lessons learned as a data governance leader for UNSW and from key resources around the world. I designed this course so it would work for diverse groups of people, from data governance leaders through to business users of organisational data who need to understand data governance. AGSM and I were a bit uncertain when we scheduled this course if there would be much demand for it, so it was pleasing to see a full class.
It is a long time since I have done any teaching. The last time was pre-covid and I had almost forgotten how much fun it is to bounce ideas of a group of smart humans and the gather ideas and input from everyone. I had also forgotten how exhausting it is to be on one’s feet for two days straight.
About data governance in the age of AI
I have been pondering how data governance may need to evolve in the age of AI, and plan on writing more about this soon. One important thing to keep in mind is that, with the advent of AI across the board, data governance becomes more important than ever. We need to know important things about our data, and there need to be rules of engagement agreed across every single organisation. I have written about the need to understand the organisational data landscape and data holdings before, e.g. here The Big Five Data Questions and it is not something that is not diminishing in its importance. Here are the key things one needs to know about one’s data:
“If you are not sure why you even need to do data governance there are a number of articles and videos here. But if you are wondering how to get a handle on how big of a problem you have then here are the big five questions to ask about your data.
I got these questions from Mike Burgess, who was then CISO for Telstra (and who is now grand poo-bah at ASIO), and I thought at the time that they were the right questions to ask.
These five simple questions underpinned the start of our data governance journey at the University of New South Wales back in 2014.
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Do you know the value of your data?
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Do you know who has access to your data?
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Do you know where your data is?
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Do you know who is protecting your data?
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Do you know how well your data is protected?”
Next course
The Data Governance for Leaders course will run at AGSM again in Sydney in November 2024. Also keep an eye out for AGSM’s new AI for Organisational Innovation course, which has been developed in collaboration with Microsoft, which I will be delivering in a virtual self-paced format.