Who I am, and why this site exists

Hi, I'm Sandy Bradbury. I design and run data governance programs built around the business rather than around a diagram, aligned to the international DAMA standard without ever being handed over as a copy of it.

Very little of the job turns out to be technology. Most of it is change management and the daily habits of the people who touch data, which builds slowly and looks like nothing in a slide deck. You can publish a policy in an afternoon. Getting twenty people to actually work differently takes months, and it's the only part that counts.

What I actually do

My work is almost always one of four things. Writing the operating model that says who decides what about which data. Getting a business glossary to the point where it settles arguments instead of collecting terms. Building a data quality practice that measures something somebody will actually act on. And running the workshops that make the first three stick.

In all four, the work is the decisions, not the diagrams. Hardly any organization needs a better target-state architecture. It needs one named person who can approve a definition, one forum where cross-domain arguments get settled, and a written record of what was decided. It isn't glamorous work, and it's usually the work that changes the outcome.

About the certifications

I hold the CDMP credentials from DAMA International: the Associate level and the Data Management Fundamentals exam. DAMA is the professional body behind the DMBOK, the reference framework most large governance programs get measured against.

I mention it for one practical reason. When a governance recommendation gets pushed back on inside an organization — and it will — it helps enormously that the framework behind it is an international standard with decades of practice behind it, rather than the personal preference of whichever consultant is in the room. The DMBOK isn't a delivery plan, and I'd never hand one over as though it were, but it's a starting point anybody in the meeting can go and check.

Things I've written elsewhere

Not all of it ends up here. I also write about data governance for the blog of NowVertical Group, the consultancy I work for as a data governance specialist consultant out of Brazil, in Portuguese, English and Spanish — the same three languages as this site, for the same reason.

They're worth a look for a specific reason: they were written for a client audience, edited by somebody who isn't me, and published under a company's name instead of mine. If you want to check whether the material here holds up away from its own website, that's the quickest way.

Why this site exists

When I first got interested in data governance, decent information was genuinely hard to find. Plenty of vendor material, plenty of theory, and very little that told you what to do on a Tuesday morning. Years later, with the experience behind me, I caught myself explaining the same things over and over to people looking for exactly what I hadn't been able to find. What data governance is and isn't. Why a data owner has to be a business leader with a budget. Why a maturity score is a diagnosis and not a target. Why the catalog nobody filled in isn't the tool's fault.

So I started writing them down properly. That's what this site is: articles, a glossary, free templates and playbooks, a cost-of-bad-data calculator, and three scenario simulators that put you inside the trade-offs instead of describing them — Data Governance Day-to-Day, Who Owns This? and Data Literacy. No forms, no paywall, and all of it in English, Spanish and Portuguese, because governance conversations happen in the language of the people having them.

If you build your own governance out of it and never speak to me, that's exactly the idea.

If you need help

And if you'd rather not do it on your own, that's what the advisory work is for.

I work remotely, in three languages, and usually alongside an internal lead rather than in place of one — the people who have to live with the decisions should be the ones making them. Engagements run from a two-week diagnostic to a multi-quarter program; the shapes are on the advisory page, and the workshop format, including the private branded simulator spaces, is on workshops.

It's usually one of three moments: a decision that has to hold up in front of a steering committee, a glossary that finally needs sorting out, or a workshop somebody has to run. If that's where you are, the contact form reaches me directly, and I'm on LinkedIn.