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Jun 18 2025
Data Is Risky Business: Sustainability and Resilience in Data Governance
This quarterā€™s column is co-authored with Anthony Mazzarella, a fellow practitioner-academic doing research into what makes data governance ā€œtick.ā€ There has been a lot of commentary on social media and elsewhere in recent months about how data governance has failed and how we need to reframe the discussion on what it means to govern data, [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Mar 5 2025
Data Is Risky Business: Is Data Governance Failing? Or Are We Failing Data Governance?
In January, CDO Magazine carried an article by a consortium of authors including Dr. Tom Redman, John Ladley, Dr. Anne-Marie Smith, and others. The eye-catching headline: ā€œData Governance is failing ā€” hereā€™s why.ā€ The article sets out the results of a Force Field Analysis study carried out by the authors to try and understand why, [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Dec 4 2024
Data Is Risky Business: Structured, Unstructured (Who Cares?)
The Irish satirist Jonathan Swift wrote ā€œGulliverā€™s Travelsā€ almost 300 years ago, but the story of Lemuel Gulliverā€™s journey to Lilliput and beyond has resonance for data leaders today. There are important lessons to learn from the little people of Lilliput and the challenges encountered by the eponymous Gulliver.Ā  While Lilliput is where Gulliver first [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Sep 4 2024
Data Is Risky Business: Scaling Data Governance to the National Stage
I recently started a doctorate.Ā And because I obviously have too much free time after running my business, teaching, and writing columns for august publications like this, Iā€™m looking at data governance. But not at the level of the organization. My doctoral research will be a deep dive into some oft-neglected human factors that need to [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Jun 5 2024
Data Is Risky Business: The Big Picture Ethics of Small Data Actions
Regular readers of this column will have noticed a thread weaving its way through the articles over the past few months. The role of the individual in the execution of ethical data management and in addressing the risks that arise when we collect data, store data, share data, or put data to work is often [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Mar 20 2024
Data Is Risky Business: The Opportunity Exists Between Keyboard and Chair
Iā€™m doing some research work for a thing (more on that thing later in the column). My research has had me diving through all the published academic research in the field of data governance (DG) that deals with critical success factors for sustainable (as in: ā€œnot falling over and sinking into a swamp with all [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Dec 6 2023
Data Is Risky Business: Turning Abstract Ethics into Practical Practices
This quarterā€™s column draws on my keynote for DAMA Calgaryā€™s contribution to DAMA Days Canada last month, which in turn drew on some of the content in the second edition of the ā€œData Ethicsā€ book I wrote with my colleague Katherine Oā€™Keefe (particularly, Chapter 3 and Chapter 11). My keynote looked at the thorny question [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Sep 6 2023
Data is Risky Business: A Wicked Problem This Way Comes
A recent data security incident in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) got me thinking about the idea of wicked problems and data. The data security incident was the disclosure of the names, ranks, and job assignments of every officer and civilian support staff member in the PSNI. This happened due to ā€˜human errorā€™ [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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Jun 7 2023
Data is Risky Business: Data Ethics and Governance in the Age of LLMs
In the last few months, we have seen the wave of Artificial Intelligence break on the shores of wide-scale business adoption and mainstream media coverage of Large Language Models, most famously ChatGPT. While these technologies have immense potential to benefit organisations and society, they also bring with them an equal, if not greater, risk of [ā€¦]


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Author: Daragh O Brien

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