Companies of all stripes can learn from those laboring under strict data-privacy regulations, like financial institutions. For them, the discipline necessary to govern data can pay dividends — ironically — in the realm of innovation.

Well-governed data to loosely governed data is as Lean Cuisine is to a grocery bag full of raw ingredients, according to Ferd Scheepers (pictured), chief information architect at The ING Group. “If it’s well qualified, if it’s known, you know the quality of it; you know where it is — it actually makes it way easier to use a lot of innovative technologies to work with that data, because you don’t have that problem of trying to find where everything is,” he said. Granted, herding multiple data sources into a single, tightly governed stable is not easy. ING has been at it for the past six years and is still at work automating away manual tasks.

Scheepers spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the IBM Think event in Las Vegas. They discussed data corralling and governance challenges, as well as public versus private cloud. 

Cleaning the technology house of cards

Upper-level management must set the agenda for data governance, according to Scheepers. Frustratingly, this may involve prying a thousand different beloved technologies from employees’ cold, dead hands.

“The only way to be in control of your entire data landscape is to limit yourself in the technologies that you use and actually to make sure that you drive the governance from a central perspective and use the technology stack, framework, whatever you want to call it, that actually ties governance directly into the technology,” he explained. “If you think you can do that with every technology out there and it magically all works together, or you want to do the integration, I would advise against that. I think that’s way too much of a challenge.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE