My holiday in Lagos has acquired an unexpected soundtrack: the whine of an ageing engine beneath the body of a much younger car. From a distance, the vehicle announces 2025. As it draws closer, 2010 clears its throat. The grille has ambition. The engine has a memory. Somewhere between the two sits an owner hoping nobody will listen too closely.
There is ingenuity here, and I admire it. Nigerian mechanics can give an old machine a second public life with resources that would embarrass better funded workshops. Keeping a serviceable car on the road makes sense. What interests me is the point at which improving its appearance becomes a substitute for understanding its condition. That confusion travels well beyond the workshop.
I have seen its corporate equivalent in boardrooms: organisations with new strategies, polished dashboards and ageing machinery underneath. The language changes before the operating model does. A committee acquires a broader mandate. A reporting pack gains colour. The annual report announces transformation. Meanwhile, the same disputed figures circulate through the same spreadsheets, maintained by people whose knowledge has never been documented.
Data governance is particularly vulnerable to this treatment because its visible components are easy to commission. A framework can be written. Software can be purchased. Policies can be approved. Each produces something presentable, something a project sponsor can mark complete. Establishing who can authorise a use of customer information, resolve conflicting records or stop an unsafe process requires a more uncomfortable redistribution of authority.
Consider a bank proposing a more personalised customer experience. The strategy may assume that information collected across products can be combined, trusted and used for a new purpose. But whose responsibility is it to establish whether those assumptions hold? If nobody can answer, the commercial proposal contains an uncosted dependency. Calling it a data issue does little to reduce its strategic significance.
The board should be interested before the failure becomes expensive. A growth forecast built on unreliable customer records carries a different prospect of success from one supported by tested information. An acquisition becomes harder to value when nobody understands the inherited data estate. Automation can accelerate a process whose defects were previously contained by a conscientious employee checking every output.
Yet board reporting can conceal precisely these distinctions. A green status may mean a policy received approval, although the business has neither implemented it nor funded the work. A completed assessment may record risks that remain unresolved. Directors receive evidence that an activity occurred and are invited to treat it as evidence that a capability exists. The bonnet closes; the presentation moves on.
Better scrutiny begins with questions that disturb this convenience. Which strategic decisions depend on information we cannot yet trust? Who has the authority and budget to correct it? What evidence would demonstrate improvement? Where have we accepted a limitation, and does our business plan reflect it? These questions connect governance expenditure to the choices directors are actually responsible for making.
They also expose a familiar management habit: asking the governance function to own problems it cannot control. A data officer cannot repair every upstream process, negotiate every competing commercial priority or finance the replacement of obsolete systems. Accountability requires business leaders to make decisions about the information their operations create and consume. Otherwise, the organisation has appointed someone to describe the engine noise.
An older car can remain a sound proposition when its condition is understood, its maintenance funded and its limits respected. The same is true of an established business. Renewal becomes credible when the claims made for it survive inspection beneath the surface. Lagos has supplied me with a useful test for the next transformation presentation: before admiring what has changed, ask what still powers it, who maintains it, and whether it can carry the weight of the journey being promised.
- business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.comÂ
Michael Irene, CIPM, CIPP(E) certification, is a data and information governance practitioner based in London, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Higher Education Academy, UK, and can be reached via moshoke@yahoo.com; twitter: @moshoke
Rethinking higher education in Nigeria for the 21st Century