In a prior blog I bemoaned having to miss Informatica World in Vegas this week. (Regular readers of the Jillblog know that what happens in Vegas gets blogged about almost immediately.) But I feel much better now, since the Wilshire Data Governance Conference in San Francisco has already exceeded my expectations.

Attendance seems to be about double what it was at the last conference. One attendee mused aloud that this was as likely to be due to job-seekers as it was to those actually in the throes of governance planning.

Ever the optimist, I choose to highlight the good stuff. Herewith:

Janine Joseph of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota gave a presentation on "Improving Information Integrity Through Data Stewardship." She echoed what I've said in the past about there being different types of data stewards and no established best practices. "There is no industry standard out there for data stewardship," Janine said, "and I'm also going to say that's not really a problem." She went on to say that in her organization, "data stewardship is not a job description, it's a discipline," which is just as it should be.

Julian Schelbourne from Kaiser Permanente rocked the house with his "Using Collaborative Technology to Transform a Large Enterprise Into a Data Governance Culture"--the word "culture" being the subtext of so many of the hallway and cocktail conversations here at the conference. Julian explained how new business modeling techniques have combined with Wikis (Kaiser has coined the term"Kpedia") and other Web 2.0 developments to make data management more business-focused, and a lot easier.

David Loshin facilitated a rousing Special Interest Group session on the topic of MDM and data governance. Notwithstanding a few testy microphones, Dave had a good crowd of engaged data geeks...er...experts. The vendors were there in force with Oracle's Dave Butler and Siperian's Ravi Shankar weighing in on the challenges of data ownership at companies. Baseline's own Joy Medved gave a from the trenches illustration of the internal and external forces that drive governance decisions.

I also appreciated the trenchant comments from the on-the-ground contingent--people like Jeffrey MacLaren, a Data Analyst at memory technology vendor SanDisk. Jeffrey weighed in on the topic of "top down versus bottom up" data governance: "Our success has revolved around establishing goals and measures," he said, making the point that good data governance can start small and percolate upwards into broader successes.

I speak tomorrow, but there are cocktails tonight so we'll see who ends up showing. I'll blog about it either way.

Oh, and if you're reading this, you might want to sign up for the new Data Governance Newsletter that's coming out next month on BI Network. We'll be serving up some juicy tidbits on data governance every month. If I were you, I'd double down on data governance, Vegas or no Vegas.

Technorati tag: data governance, MDM, CDI, data steward