In my last two posts, we looked at a simple model of a decision-making process, and I drew the conclusion that when an individual is faced with a decision and may not trust his/her own decision-making capabilities, a way to deflect accountability for a poor decision is to call the quality of the data into question.

Interestingly, I recently conducted an informal poll asking a pool of individuals within a single organization to tell me what they thought their management’s expectations for value to be derived from a data governance activity were. The answer with the highest score was “trustworthy reporting.” But during a review of the results, some of the attendees noted that in fact the real value doesn’t come from the level of trust in the report, but rather the quality of the decisions.

From our thought experiment of the past two posts, I believe that improving the quality of the data reinforces the quality of good decisions. That should diminish the importance of establishing a level of trust in reports. On the contrary: if questioning the data is an excuse for deferring a decision, then assuring the quality of the data eliminates data quality as an excuse. The result is that ensuring the quality of data used for decision making enables an organization to truly determine those individuals whose decisions are truly “good.”