Data Governance Masterclass - with Winfried Etzel

A Rare Opportunity

Winfried Etzel (linkedin), author of the upcoming book - Data Governance in the Wild - is coming to Austin for the Data AI Weekend. While he is in town, we invited him to offer his Data Governance Masterclass. This is a standalone event - limited to the first twenty registrants. Since Winfried is coming all the way from Norway - this is a rare opportunity - not to be missed.

Data Governance

Data governance is the human-based system that ensures autonomous behavior remains aligned with organizational intent, direction, and accountability over time.

AI agents are increasingly embedded in operational data flows. They read data that is not governed. They make decisions at speeds traditional review cycles cannot match. Board of Directors, regulators, and internal teams are asking questions about who decides, on what basis, and who is accountable. Many organizations cannot yet answer with confidence.

This three-hour session is for the leaders and practitioners responsible for closing that gap.

The session takes a specific position: data governance is a human-based, multidisciplinary system inside socio-technical organizations, and AI governance is a particular instance of it, not a separate discipline. The foundational questions remain the same: who decides, on what basis, under what constraints, and who is accountable. Speed, scale, and feedback are what change.

What the class will cover

This workshop is built around the Four “Think Across” Axes:

• Unified Governance Scopes: Data governance, AI governance, and agent governance as one discipline, not three. The questions stay the same, while speed and feedback are what change.
• The Meaning Side: Shared meaning across domains, and the contracts and interfaces that carry it. How intent gets stated, agreed, and held over time.
• The Technical Side: How that meaning gets encoded in schemas, types, pipelines, and model context, and where the encoding drifts from intent in production.
• Practical Federation: Federation, decision rights, and lifecycle controls that turn governance into something the organization does, not something it has.

You will walk away with

• An Activation Map for your organization
• A Delegation-and-Decision-Rights Canvas
• A 30-day commitment plan with named evidence to track immediate progress