This week, let’s look at an infamous example of the failure
of governance — the Volkswagen “pollution test firmware hack” that
made the news in 2015.
As of this writing, at least four nations are pursuing
criminal investigations of various people and organizational units within
Volkswagen, to see just how many legal and regulatory constraints were
side-stepped, ignored, or flat-out violated as the company tried to improve its
overall fleet air quality and fuel economy standards.
Your task: determine whether this unfortunate chain of
events was caused, aided and abetted by a lack of governance mechanisms, or
whether those mechanisms and policies were in place but somehow systematically
avoided, evaded, neutralized, or otherwise disregarded by the people
responsible.
Present your thesis, findings and conclusions in a
properly-formatted APA style paper, with title page, references, etc. While no
set maximum length on the body of the paper is established, if you’re going
much beyond 8 pages (or far less than 2), you may wish to seriously re-examine
your work to see if it’s addressing the issues and the data effectively.
You’ll need to research this incident, both to get a good
sense of background and have some specific data to support your arguments and
conclusions with. Since whole situation is still an ongoing set of
investigations in many places, the published data, evidence and analyses are at
best “preliminary.” But there should be more than enough “out
there” for you to get a good look into this situation and with which you
can formulate some opinions.
The following general questions about information governance
may help you in framing your research, analysis, and organization of your
findings:
1. What is the purpose and scope of data governance? How
does this compare and contrast with the purposes of information quality
assurance, or software quality assurance?
2. It is said that data or information governance helps play
a role in business process management, in process re-engineering and in
continuous quality improvement. Explain how this works, in general terms.
3. What role should information governance considerations
play when determining the organization’s information security and assurance
needs? How should these consider the needs to assure correct, timely,
properly-informed decision making (and the correct implementation of those
decisions)?
4. Considering your answers to the preceding questions, what
conflicts do you see between these various processes? Does one of them seem to
be a more natural leader for the others, for example? Or are they all supposed
to be working somehow in harmony without any one in the driver’s seat? Explain
how you see these kinds of issues being worked out, using an example (real or
hypothetical) to illustrate.
