OODA Loop for Data Governance

Overview

Adapting Boyd’s OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) to data governance. The sequence matters: you can’t govern what you can’t see.

The Loop

OBSERVE: What data exists?

Before you can govern data, you need to see it. This means:

• Cataloging data assets across systems
• Making the inventory searchable
• Understanding what’s actually being collected vs. what’s documented

ORIENT: Can I trust it?

Knowing data exists isn’t enough. You need to know its quality:

• Freshness: When was it last updated?
• Completeness: What’s missing?
• Accuracy: How do we know it’s right?
• Lineage: Where did it come from?

DECIDE: What should I prioritize?

Not all data quality issues matter equally. Prioritize based on:

• Business impact of the data
• Severity of quality issues
• Cost to remediate
• Dependencies (what else breaks if this is wrong?)

ACT: How do I improve it?

Action flows from understanding, not guesswork:

• Fix root causes, not symptoms
• Automate quality checks where possible
• Build feedback loops to catch drift

Why This Matters for AI

“AI readiness” isn’t primarily about AI. It’s about whether you can answer: What data do we have, and can we trust it?

Every AI conversation eventually becomes a data conversation. Every data conversation eventually becomes a governance conversation. The organizations that understand this sequence position themselves to actually use AI effectively.

The Compounding Effect

Governance work compounds in ways that aren’t immediately visible:

• A searchable data dictionary reduces “where does this come from?” from hours to seconds
• Quality metadata lets you scope AI projects to trustworthy data
• Lineage tracking makes debugging possible

The unglamorous work is the engine room work, the machinery that makes everything else possible.

The Gap Test

If someone asked you today to list every table containing customer data with its quality grade and last-updated timestamp, how long would that take?

That gap (between asking and knowing, is your governance opportunity.

Related: 04-atom—data-governance