If you have a Data Governance program today you already know its easier to start one that do one.  Real governing is not like a Hollywood movie.  Its hard to know what’s wrong, why its wrong, how to fix it, and how to get people to care or follow the fixes.

I left Facebook.  A week ago, I deleted all my photo albums, de-friended everyone, and deleted my account.  I had long wanted out, but the trigger for me was the news article about the two British tourists who were deported in LA for tweeting their intentions to party in the USA with UK Vernacular gusto.  Social Media was cool and fun in 2008-11, but in 2012 its becoming far less social, more corporate, and very dangerous.

Today, most Social Media has less “social” content and a lot more corporate content.  What I found fun about Facebook in the beginning was the opportunity to discover people around the world who had interests similar to mine who I might otherwise never meet.  It gave me an unfiltered way of discovering ideas and opinions.  But today, Facebook is flooded with corporate advertising.  Advertising isn’t social – its corporate.  And corporatism invades every other part of our lives.  In America, shopping is already a predominate pastime and recreational activity.  I want my social life to be social.  But its a free country – still – and Facebook is free to go and get an IPO and transform itself into a new fangled Old Media Platform with the word “Social” in it.

But I want to be Social online with other social people who think of themselves as friends in an open-source standards based environment.  I don’t want to be a customer or a product of a company when I interact with my family and friends.  I don’t want my ideas data mined and mis-interpreted by ad agencies, corporate sponsors, media tracking entities, and national security organizations.

Look, it always was dangerous to post your ideas online.  A spouse, friend, family member or employer could always misinterpret what you said online and hold you accountable.  Trolling and stalking online could get you arrested.  But none of those outcomes compare to the jurisdictional nightmares that await tourists and travelers who have their tweets misinterpreted by nation-states they may visit.  Jail, deportation, and other dreaded outcomes await those who think their tweets defend freedom when less free places read them.  And btw, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist and there is already enough evidence of Thought Crime prosecutions from tweets and rants posted online to make every Social Citizen take note, be very alarmed, and more circumspect about what they tweet or post.

We the people need a Social Bill of Rights.

- To protect our rights to think out loud on-line and off, to write our ideas, argue with those who disagree.

- To be social when we want to be.

- To tell corporate interests to bugger off and leave us alone when we don’t want to be sold to.

- To have self-determination over our own data – its quality, availability, and deletion.

- To be free to speak and learn anywhere in the world, on-line and off, without fear of penalty, prosecution, or incarceration.  You are not free if you cannot speak and learn without injury.

- To have all these rights respected and protected through international treaty.

When these rights are provided to every human being in every nation, Social media will be social again and safe.

Right now, its swim at your own risk and I’m choosing to stay dry.

Yesterday was a beautiful day.  I awoke early and drove to the Marine Air Terminal to catch a mid-morning shuttle to Washington DC.  Traffic was light on the way to the airport.  Parking just next to the Terminal, walking through the 1939 former Pan Am terminal with murals celebrating the world’s first trans-Atlantic Clipper service, I had no premonition how different the day would be than all others.   There was no queue at the self-service counter when I picked up my boarding pass, and security was a breeze.  The gate lounge was relaxed and quiet while I read the Financial Times about the Debt Crisis in Greece.  We boarded a few minutes after the hour and I was concerned about a late departure but we arrived ahead of schedule and for the first time in a long time, I was early to my lunch date on K Street.

The weather in DC was glorious.  I hardly noticed how warm it was in the cab from the airport as we rushed through half-empty noontime streets.  But after lunch, as I walked to my next meeting I noticed how many students were sitting on the grass in parks in T-shirts and jeans.  It was 68 degrees Fahrenheit on January 31, 2012.  Next to the students was a long line of homeless people picking up sandwich lunches that a local church was giving out.  The homeless far outnumbered the students, a grim reminder on a perfect day that many have lives far from perfect just a few blocks from the White House.

In the midst of this contrast, my wife called to ask if I had seen the USA Today article (http://tinyurl.com/78r2z2c) about the two British tourists who had been deported in LAX because of two joke tweets they had written on Twitter.  I hadn’t and didn’t know what she was talking about so she texted me the URL.  Two young British citizens in the mid-twenties had used British slang to describe how excited they were to travel to Los Angeles and party for three weeks and the US Department of Homeland Security, who apparently monitor all Twitter messages, interpreted that vernacular to be a potential threat to the United States.  The two were apprehended at Passport Control as they arrived, handcuffed, interrogated for 5 hours, locked up overnight in an immigrant holding cell, and promptly deported in the morning.

The offending tweets?

“3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p*ssing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!” (posted Jan. 3)

“Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?” (posted Jan. 16)

Its unclear from the press accounts if the two have a criminal record in the UK, or any other incriminating evidence linking them to terrorist organizations.  One is a pub owner, the other his girlfriend.  The tweets are a tad sloppy perhaps, but when did sloppy tweets become a reason for imprisonment and deportation?  “Destroy” is apparently British Slang for binge drinking, and diggin up Marilyn Monroe is another vernacular party reference.  Of course, Tweets are very short, and people cram all kinds of quarter-thoughts into them in non-nonsensical strings of thoughts meant not to be “sentences” but gibes and jokes, references, and innuendo.  Its shorthand for friends, comments for fans, staccato blabber.

In America, we like to think of ourselves as intrinsically good.  We have a constitution, a Bill of Rights, and believe in the rule of law.  We hold that people are innocent until proven guilty – of crimes they actually commit or plan to commit.  In our Constitution, we have an Amendment which defines the right to the Freedom of Speech.  It reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Twitter is speech.  People who write on twitter assemble publicly. That speech is protected by the first Amendment.  Writing is the articulation of Thought.  It is not a crime to think bad thoughts and write them down.  It is a crime to act on bad thoughts written down: to actively plan, conspire, or commit illegal acts.

But when one State monitors thoughts written down, in 140 characters or less, and uses that information to deprive people of their rights, without due process, that heinous example will be copied by other States and no one is safe from the Tyranny of staccato-blabber-incrimination anywhere.

It was at that moment, in the park, between the students and the homeless, on an unbelievably beautiful Washington Day, that I realized how much the world had changed and hard it would be to ever go back to the pre-Twitter days when the Internet was free, speech was protected, and the prosecution of Thought Crimes was an ancient Cold War nightmare or more recent Hollywood fable.

Now, of course, the two British Tweens in Los Angeles are not American Citizens protected by the American Constitution.  They have no rights under the First Amendment.  Those rights are only provided to American Citizens.  So, DHS was within the law in deciding to deport them.  But woe be to all of us for the precedent this sets.

The world is inter-connected.  Every idea is copied.  When the United States of America uses technology to monitor the thoughts of people in its country or visiting its country, that example will be copied.  Other Nation States with their own interpretations of Twitter will decide if Americans visiting their Nation have committed Thought Crimes against their State and the penalties could be much more severe.

You could be arriving in Shanghai on business, when Chinese immigration officials stop you at passport control to inquire about the Tweet you wrote in 2008 on the Anniversary of Tienanmen Square.  Or you could be en route to Israel via Kiev, when Ukranian border police imprison you over a Facebook post you wrote commenting on an unflattering cartoon of their President.  Or you could be vacationing in Victoria Falls, when Zanu-PF police arrest you in your hotel because you participated in Skype conversations with a Zimbabwean friend who lives in South Africa and often blogs against the Mugabe regime.

There are no international treaties protecting Tweets, Faces, or Skypes.  What you write and say online can and will be used against you.  And the rules will be arbitrary, the punishments potentially quite severe.  And every Nation will assert their own jurisdiction to protect the power of Governance over the extremely threatening ability of individuals to use technology to communicate, share ideas, and self-organize purposes not orchestrated by the Nation.

I walked the streets in a daze.  Everything seemed different, tainted with the knowledge that every idea in every persons head that I passed could be written on twitter and misinterpreted.  A few minutes later, I was in the office talking with some colleagues and mentioned this story to a friend.  He doesn’t travel much and didn’t feel directly threatened by the story.  “It could have been a couple of inexperienced DHS officers… and Los Angeles is a strange place anyway” he said.  I asked if he had a Twitter account, Facebook, etc, and was at all concerned about what he wrote with those tools.  Yes to the accounts, no concern.

“I don’t care if they watch me, I don’t do anything wrong.”

That’s what young American idealists said in the 1930′s when they attended Socialist rallies during the Great Depression when it seemed Capitalism had failed and the nation was hungry for new ideas.  Twenty years later, those people were hunted down, put on Black Lists, monitored, humiliated in Congressional hearings, and deprived of their ability to work in many professions.  These days, it would only take twenty minutes for a video camera or text search monitor to find what you wrote, said, or did and hold you accountable.  Maybe you belong to a Union in Ohio or Minnesota, with an active Governor campaigning against Unions?  Maybe you subscribe to the Occupy Movement Facebook page?  Maybe you joined the Tea Party and Tweet about Conservative ideas?

Maybe you are a libertarian and bemoan the loss of Civil Rights in blog articles.

The technology to monitor what you say and do is trivial today, and thanks to two unlucky British tourists in Los Angeles we all know it is being used.  Any idea written down on the Internet CAN be monitored and interpreted by a State anywhere in the world with the right to imprison or kill you, your family, and all your friends on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

This isn’t 1984.  This is 2012 and these are the last days of Internet Freedom.  Mark my words.  EVERYTHING has changed.

MIKE2.0 (www.openmethodology.org) is an open initiative to encourage a consistent approach to Information Management.  There are a number of contributors to MIKE2.0 who are also participants in the InfoGov Community so we thought it would useful to record a podcast overview of MIKE2.0 and how it is complementary to the InfoGov Community.  I hope you enjoy the recording:

Introduction to MIKE2

Using Information and Analytics To Gain Competitive Advantage…

The movement toward pervasive business intelligence (BI) is driving IT and business leaders to realize the importance of establishing a comprehensive data governance strategy to ensure the quality, accuracy and protection of an organization’s most valuable asset. With more and more users demanding direct access to trusted and accurate data, the need for a holistic approach to managing and leveraging information for maximum gain has never been greater.

Attend our upcoming Information Integration and Governance Forum to learn the essential policies, processes and organizational structures required to build an effective framework to govern your organization’s data throughout its lifecycle.

Fox News Caught Using Fake Video Of Protests

If Media acts like a propoganda arm of the US Government to disseminate mis-information about events abroad, how much mis-information is disseminated about events at home?

Traditional scientific analysis says that to understand a problem you have to take apart the issue and decompose it into all its components and sub-components.  But this doesn’t explain systemic issues in which the cause of a problem is outside the problem itself.

For example, Banks have bad data quality in their branch operations.  A traditional IT approach to this problem would be to inspect the data to understand the incidences of bad data quality and trace the lineage to discover its origins.  A systemic approach would be to see bad data quality in the larger context of a banking data system and to try to understand why does a Bank have branches, why do branches produce data, how do the branches interact with data, and why is it sometimes bad?  The two approaches might arrive at similar conclusions, but not always solve the same problems.

I’ve been a fan of systems thinking for many years.  Its a fascinating way of seeing the world that is, unfortunately, hampered by its own complexity.  It’s taken humanity thousands of years to get accustomed to communicating cause and effect.  You probably remember when you learned cause and effect in high school or college.  It still has to be taught.  And the fact is that for most of the history of civilisation, cause and effect could describe most interactions, problems, and solutions.  In 1804, there were 1 billion people on the planet.  It took another 120 years to reach 2 billion, and by 1974 that doubled to 4.  Today, were at 7, and by 2046 it will be 9 billion.  Large numbers of people create ever larger systems of use and interaction whose complexity itself requires new ways of thinking to comprehend far more correlations than simple cause and effect.

Few people have understood or articulated these issues as well as Russell Ackoff (1919-2009).  I am sorry I didn’t meet him while he was alive, but many of his wonderful speeches and ideas are recorded online.  Take 10 minutes to get to know him.  Its really worth it.

In 2007, I hosted an IBM Data Governance Council Meeting at the Ritz Carlton Bachelor’s Gulch in Vale Colorado. It was September, and we were 40 people 9000 feet up in the mountains, meeting to review our recently created Data Governance Maturity Model.  We had foxes meeting us at the fire pit every night, and I invited a bunch of analysts to participate and offer us their worldly verdicts on the Maturity Model – to both bless our work and offer suggestions on how to use it. It was the first time we had shared the model with “outsiders” and it was also the first time any of us reported on its usage to others. So it was a kind of debut.

Unfortunately, none of the invited analysts followed the script I gave them. Instead of presenting their analysis of the model, they each just talked about how great their analyst firms were and what services they could provide to the customers in the room. This was, in fact, the exact thing I didn’t want them to do but you know its just human nature that people often show up unprepared and give you whatever they are good at giving regardless of what you really need.

I held back on my displeasure during the first two analyst presentations, hoping against hope that the last one would deliver what I asked and salvage the day. But he didn’t, and by then most of my Council members were staring at their blackberries, walking out to talk on the phone, or staring out the window at the valley below. I was pacing around the room in my mind trying to figure out how to get these guys back on track to deliver the content we all wanted to hear.

So, I just interrupted him and said, “that’s really nice about your company but we invited you here to tell us about the Maturity Model. What do you think about it?”

Analyst: puzzled look and silence.

Audience: Now awake, smiling, some giggling in the back of the room. The tension is thick.

Steve: “Did you read it?”

Analsyt #3: “No”

Analyst #2: “No”

Analyst #1: “Yes, I read it and its a hard read (grumble, grumble – how dare you interrupt my gratuitous sales pitch). Its way ahead of its time. 95% of my customers aren’t ready for this. They are under-appreciated and stuck on the basics.  They need help with metrics.  They don’t know how to sell Data Governance to the Business and they need the most help just getting the justification to start a program. This Maturity Model is for companies who are already running towards Data Governance. My customers are sill learning to crawl.”

You don’t get much truth in this world if you don’t poke people. I poked this guy and he gave us the truth we didn’t want to hear then and four years later most companies still don’t know how to sell Data Governance to “The Business.”

They lack the facts, the patterns of problems, metrics and impacts that together make a business case for change. Change isn’t easy. Most people reject change when they see it for the first time. You need clear and consistent language to convince people to change, and consistency is just one of the hardest things to accomplish.

Well, here’s a super new book, written by my friend Sunil Soares, that can help every organisation develop those clear and consistent business cases which are the essential ingredient for Data Governance Success. Its called “Selling Information Governance to the Business” and its not just another theoretical methodology for college professors or sales reps. This book is a meticulously researched and well documented exploration of the metrics, indicators, and elements of Data Governance business cases by industry. It contains all the raw materials and roadmaps you need to build successful Data Governance business cases and consistently sell your policy ideas to “The Business.”

I don’t want to write a fake review with all the superlatives you read in the phoney movie reviews these days. I’m telling you honestly – this is a great book. Its an important contribution to our industry. It will help you succeed.  Its detailed and I think everyone will benefit from reading it.  I recommend this book and if I end up teaching another class on Data Governance I will use it as primary source material for my students.  Its that good folks.

I really believe fundamentally that this industry won’t succeed without more companies starting programs that will succeed.  And you can’t succeed without a consistent method to building business cases for change based on real evidence.  This book can help you get the evidence and build the business case.  You’ll still need to translate this into things that will work in your organisation, finding the data patterns and problems that require policies and compliance.  And you will need technology to help orchestrate all of that.

But this book is the best example I’ve seen on how to get started and how to succeed.  I recommend it highly.

You can buy it here online or you can pick up a signed copy from the Author when he presents it at The Information Governance Community Meeting on October 23rd @ IOD

The Information Governance Community will meet at IBM’s Information on Demand Conference on Sunday October 23, at THE Hotel in Las Vegas, NV

New speakers are being added every day.  Space is limited so register toay!

Two years ago, I met Helmut Willke, the author of Smart Governance: Governing the Global Knowledge Society, at a hotel cafe near the great cathedral of Cologne. Professor Willke is a sociologist who teaches Global Governance at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany.  Late in 2009 I became interested in Governance as a system of decision-making and Professor Willke had written an excellent book exploring this topic.  While the Professor is German, he writes extremely well in English and his book very well written and insightful.  Like a lot of philosophical texts, it is not an easy read.  Dense descriptions, long sentences, and theory backed by ample example make it a book you have to read at least twice to fully comprehend.

I was in Cologne in late February 2010 to meet the CIO of the City and attend Rosenmontag at City Hall.  I had already seen several days of Karnival, with the endless parades, costumes, and candy strewn about the streets.  For five or six days in February, the staid and reserved city of Cologne becomes an endless drunken party attracting visitors from all over the world who wear outrageous costumes and march in parades on incredible floats and throw candy to the bystanders.  Its unlike any parade I have ever seen.  Quite amazing.

It had snowed a lot that year.  It was white from Brussels to Berlin, and Cologne was still covered by eight inches.  The square in front of the Dom was clear, and I had spent the morning before our meeting visiting the Roman museum across the square.  Cologne is an ancient Roman city and the ruins are collected in a fantastic museum right next to the Dom.  Of course there are columns and pediments, but also beautiful mosaic floors, jewellery, stained glass, and decorative arts.  There is a model of the Roman city and you can see how the Germans built the city on the same street grid with walls built on top of the Roman walls.  Of course, much of this was destroyed by allied bombs in WWII, but some remnants remain.

Looking back at Roman colonial rule of Cologne was an excellent introduction to the systemic ideas of Governance Professor Willke and I discussed over coffee that afternoon. He is not a tall man, mostly grey late-50′s I would say, with bright blue eyes.  He makes an immediate impression, and is passionate about his book.  I had used the book as text for a class I taught at the Bucerius Law School on Data Governance in Hamburg that January.  My students did not entirely appreciate the dense prose and abstract ideas, but through class conversation we did ultimately appreciate the idea that Governance is a system of decision-making that could be described and modelled.  And we used Social Networking metaphors to explore the idea of policy-making, human behaviours in a system of Governance, and how to model potential outcomes.  Of course there is political science, which describes political models of Governance – Democracy, Dictatorship, Monarchy, etc – but what is unique and important about Professor Willke’s book is the application of systems theory to Governance.

We had some coffee and talked mostly about how the Professor wrote the book and why.  As I had in 2007-8, the Professor had used the Global Credit Crisis as a use case to describe failures in Governance.  I had covered this topic from a Data Governance perspective, arguing that hundreds of incremental failures in business processes and data quality had produced a domino effect that plunged the global economy into Depression.  He covered the topic from a decision-making perspective, and while we approached this topic from different directions we arrived at similar conclusions – policy-makers can’t possibly make the best decisions without understanding the consequences of those decisions on incredibly complex and interconnected global systems.  And those consequences are impossible to understand without new information systems that render the complexity with software and illustrate how the policies will be accepted and resisted.

In my class at Bucerius, my students complained that the Professor had not done enough to provide solutions to the problems he had identified, or that his solutions were too abstract.  I presented these criticisms to him at our meeting and he responded that it was not possible to offer concrete solutions because every systemic problem needs to be modelled to understand the variables and outcomes – that there is no one size fits all.  At the time, I thought this was a dodge.  It took me a few more years to understand that he was right.

There are no Governance Solutions that can auto-magically produce the best outcomes for every decision.  But it is possible for policy-makers to use systems theory and software to construct decision-making models that can plot many of the actors, objects, variables, and potential outcomes to understand the impact of policies on complex systems made up of hundreds, thousands, and even millions of human beings with unique behaviours.

After my course, I synthesised concepts from the book with ideas from my students to create the Six Steps to Smart Governance.  It’s not meant to be a Framework. Frameworks and models are nice tools to help people feel more secure about challenges they seek to overcome, but they are not useful in making better decisions.  The Six Steps are meant to be a structure for decision-making that one would apply iteratively; in which each of the six steps would involve different data points and variables.  Of course, it is highly summarised, flavoured with marketing.  And I would say in hindsight, its not really useful as a practical or operational tool.  It’s really just a theory, a simplification of the better documented ideas Professor Willke writes about in his book.

And I think we can do better.  In the IBM Data Governance Council we will soon begin to explore dynamic simulation models that go far beyond the Six Steps to Smart Governance, and I recommend reading both the white paper and Professor Willke’s book:

Smart Governance: Governing the Global Knowledge Society

Today, thanks to really powerful simulation software, we can create dynamic models that help demonstrate the impact of policy on people, processes, and technology.  The Data Governance Simulation Project will revolutionise the field of Data Governance by applying theory, software, and observed practices to an interactive model that will yield powerful insights into Data Governance Value Creation and Risk Mitigation.

A lot of people ask me, “how do I show the value of metadata?”  Some say, “how do I make the business case for Data Governance?”  Consultants and Gurus will have a framework or process to offer you, a get started guide with use-case examples, graphics, and legends about their successes.  But these myths won’t help you, because your challenges are unique.  Your politics are special, and your people are not machines.  Best practices are useful examples of glorified solutions that are very hard to replicate outside the lab.  And as many are already finding out, people resist policies they don’t think apply to them and its really tricky to understand how to change organisational behaviours on an on-going basis without policies that dynamically change with new circumstances.

Data Governance is, by nature, a systemic challenge and you can’t solve systemic problems without systemic solutions.  Projects and teams that expect quick hits and 90-results are the reason you have systemic Data Governance problems in the first place.  But it is possible to create software models that allow you to plot the goals, metrics, policies, communications, outcomes, variables, and modifiers and evaluate the impact of new policies and controls on your environment.

And that’s the lesson of Smart Governance: you can model complex environments through Simulation and make better decisions.  To learn more about using Simulations to make better decisions, take a look at the IBM Smarter Cities Demo.  In that demo, the complex interactions of human beings living in a city are compared to the goals of human policies, the metrics measured by interactions, and potential outcomes.

Many of our organisations are as complex as small cities.  Policy and Politics share the same ancient Greek root word – epolis.  epolis is a city, which itself is an aggregation of human beings who require Governance to arbitrate their diverse interests and achieve better outcomes for all.   Today, we can simulate those interactions and help Policy makers profile the impact of their policies before they are deployed.  Its a kind of Visual Risk Calculation.

If you would like to participate in the Data Governance Simulation project, please read the Six Steps to Smart Governance White Paper, the book by Professor Willke, and  join the IBM Data Governance Council by executing this membership agreement.

Only members of the Council will be able to participate in this exercise and you don’t want to miss this because it will fundamentally change Data Governance.