Data Governance III

My prediction? Pain

We are about to see a mass wave of agentic AI adoption. All we need to do is get data governance sorted out.

Right? Right?

I’d love to believe this conceit, but unfortunately I’ve already lived through two waves of enterprise data governance enthusiasm — the first in support of BI, the second during the era of “big data” and analytics enthusiasm.

In the film Rocky III (nothing but highbrow references from me), Rocky discovers that although he has won the heavyweight title and defended it ten times, he’s not actually quite the fighter he believed. His manager has been arranging easy fights against inferior opponents. The new challenger Clubber Lang (played by Mr. T, one of my childhood heroes) is smarter, tougher, stronger, and faster. In the first fight, he takes on Rocky and beats the snot out of him.

Data Governance III is going to be a lot like Rocky III.

Like the original Rocky film, the original Data Governance picture ended with a loss. Gartner estimated that 70-80% of BI-motivated data governance initiatives failed, mostly due to data quality challenges and squabbles over data ownership. Everyone remembers it as a win, but go back and rewatch the film — both Rocky and the governors of data took a beating, and simply managed to hang on through the final round.

Then Data Governance II. Just like Rocky, the data people trained harder this time. They bought superior tools, set up better governance boards, learned some lessons from their original loss. And they started winning. We started seeing self-service BI, user-built dashboards, sometimes even the elusive “single pane of glass” and “single version of the truth,” all to much acclaim and applause.

But as Mickey told Rocky about his opponents: “Those were handpicked. Set-ups. You never had real competition.”

In Data Governance III, the role of Clubber will be played by AI agents.

Clubber was smarter, tougher, stronger and faster than Rocky’s previous ten opponents. AI agents are smarter, tougher, stronger and faster than the human users who were consuming data during the last big governance wave. They don’t just read data — they act on it. They send emails, update records, trigger workflows, make decisions, all much faster than any human being.

And so the governed data is going to have to be better than ever before. What’s more, governing the data won’t be enough. The agents themselves will also have to be governed. Companies will need to define what an agent is allowed to see, touch, and do, on whose behalf, in which contexts.

Rocky won the second fight in Rocky III, of course. And I believe organizations will win Data Governance III as well. But they’re quite likely going to take a beating first, followed by some soul-searching, some staring out at the ocean, and some very hard training that’s tougher than anything they’ve every done.