Data organizations often struggle to strike the right balance between governance and agility. Too much governance often results in high levels of oversight and long wait times for data projects. Conversely, high agility often means few guardrails, redundant work, and mismatching metrics. How do we find the balance between governance and agility?

While tools and technologies can help, ultimately this tension can only be eased by people. Through socializing governance practices, educating on business topics, and connecting networks across the organization, we can help organizations with strong governance move more nimbly and help highly democratized companies ensure more consistency. 

In this presentation, we will discuss two case studies: one that began as highly governed and the other highly agile, and how they moved to more neutral ground without giving up key requirements. We will provide everyday tips and robust organizational changes that can help ease the tension between governance and agility.

Speaker: Vanessa Lam

As Founder and Principal of BRSdata, Vanessa Lam created the data arm of Business Rule Solutions (BRS), focusing on data culture, data governance, and business intelligence. Vanessa specializes in building data-driven organizations where operations and leadership use the data to drive decisions. She was previously Manager of Business Insights and Productivity at Mastercard and Manager of Business Intelligence at Optoro. There, she created educational tools, fostered data communities, and ensured responsible data use. Vanessa’s articles on data culture and governance are published in the Business Rules Journal and The Data Administration Newsletter. She has spoken at Enterprise Data World, Building Business Capability, Tableau User Group, and Predictive Analytics World. She has a Master of Computer and Information Technology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BSc in Economics from the Wharton School. In 2021, IIBA named her a top influencer to watch. You can follow her at @Big_On_Data on Twitter.