and that can be terrifying for a narcissist. What are some ways that we can disarm this narcissist and use their psychology for the benefit of us and others? One of the most important things to understand about behavior is we always act on a basis of needs and fears. So we need to understand what is the thing that they're actually prioritizing? How do they want to be seen and how can you talk to that identity? And what's the things that they're actually fearing? Are they fearing being seen? Are they fearing everyone seeing through the narcissistic mask? Are they looking to have more status and have more power? If you're talking to someone who's highly controlling and is looking for that power, but you can kind of talk to that covertly by saying, well, everyone knows the most powerful people or the most successful people will actually act in this manner. And also, you know, depending on how confrontation they can get, you can start playing on those fears as well and sort of saying, look, everyone's starting to see through actually who you actually are. And that can be terrifying for a narcissist.


Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Camp and I'm the Executive Editor of DataVersity. We would like to thank you for joining the current 2015 installment of the Monthly DataVersity Webinar Series, Real World Data Governance with Bob Siner. Today Bob will be discussing data governance best practice criteria along with special guest speaker Craig Mullins. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them via the Q&A in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights of questions by Twitter using hashtag RWDG, Real World Data Governance. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the slides, the recording of this session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me introduce to you our speakers for today, Bob Siner and special guest Craig Mullins. Craig is President and Principal Consultant of Mullins Consulting Incorporated and the publisher editor of the database site, which is URL is thedatabaseite.com. His working experience spans three decades of multiple industries. Craig is the author of two best-selling books including Database Administration, The Complete Guide to DBA Practices and Procedures, second edition. Bob is the President and Principal of KIK Consulting and Educational Services and is the publisher of the Data Administration newsletter, tdan.com. Bob has been a recipient of the Damon Professional Award for significant and demonstrable contributions to the data management industry. Bob specializes in non-invasive data governance, data stewardship, and metadata management solutions. And with that, I will give the floor to Bob to get today's webinar started. Hello and welcome. Thank you very much, Shannon. Thank you everybody for joining us today. Thank you always. I appreciate you're taking some of your valuable time to attend this webinar. I'm very glad to be doing this webinar with a good friend of mine, Craig Mullins. As you might know or might not know, I'm a Pittsburgh guy by the fact that I live here still. But a good friend of mine who went to the University of Pittsburgh, Craig Mullins, is joining us today. And he'll be talking to us about data governance best practice criteria from more of a database administration perspective. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in one second. But welcome to the webinar today. I hope you'll find some information here that's valuable to take some good takeaways with it. Real quickly before we get started, I just want to remind you of a few things. One is the book of non-invasive data governance that was published back in September. The second is please visit kikconsulting.com for more information about a lot of the things that I talk about non-invasive data governance specifically. And also, I am so pleased to be able to speak at many diversity events. I just wanted to highlight a couple of those for you too before we get started. Coming up at the end of the month and into the beginning of next month is Enterprise Data World. The topic that I get to speak on is one that I'm very excited about. It's actually progressive topics in data governance. We'll talk about big data and data governance. We'll talk about agile and data governance. And we'll talk about the Internet of Things and data governance. So please join us there. And if you can or can't make it to D.C., please join us in San Diego for the annual Data Governance and Information Quality Conference. And I'll list the presentations that I'll be giving there. So I'm looking forward to meeting some of you, any of you, all of you out there at those events. So please, I'm looking forward to having you there. Just also to let you know about some of the upcoming webinars next month. And as you know, it's always the third Thursday of the month at 2 p.m. We'll be talking about data governance framework components. We'll be talking about building your own data governance tools and the fact that everybody is a steward and how we can get people to deal with that. We'll be talking about those three topics in the coming up three months. So I hope that you will join me for that as well. Here's the abstract that I used to attract you to the webinar today. The fact is that best practices are often the first step that organizations address when they're building new types of programs. So best practices define the target behaviors. This month I'm working with Craig, where Craig will also share with us some of the best practices around database administration as well. So I'm looking forward to getting that perspective as well. We're going to talk about the criteria first and foremost to what determines something to be best practice around data governance, around data management. And Craig will talk about database administration. We'll talk about how to evaluate your organization against the best practice and how to maximize the value of the thing that everybody calls an assessment or a critical analysis of the organization, steps that must be taken after completing the analysis and then how do we measure whether or not we're successful in achieving some of the best practices that we've defined for ourselves. So here's our agenda for today. I'm going to give Craig a moment to introduce himself further, but pretty much everything that I'm going to share on the next slide is already shared with you. I'm going to ask Craig for a couple minutes of conversation about database administration best practices, specifically around governance. And then we're going to talk about those topics and leave some time for questions and answers. So sit back. I hope it's enjoyable. I hope to get some good questions and look forward to sharing the information with you. Well, first thing I want to tell you about Craig before I let him talk is that Craig is one of my oldest industry friends. I've known Craig since we went to college together at the University of Pittsburgh. We interned at the same company together. And Craig and I took distinct paths in the data field. Craig specifically focusing on database administration and my more focusing on data administration, everything that Shannon had mentioned about him being the president and principal consultant of this consulting company. And he also has a publication around databases, which is the database site. In fact, Craig was the person who helped me to name the name of my website. He also has authored a few books. He speaks a lot at conferences. Craig, welcome aboard. Good to have you here. Thanks. Good to be here, Bob. Yeah, as you mentioned, we go back a long ways. And I think this is the first time we've ever really delivered a presentation together. We've been at the same places and delivered presentations separately, but first time as a tag team, I guess. Well, it's kind of interesting. So we just got to keep it interesting for people. That's all. But it's good. I know you've got a lot of opinions and a lot of things. And neither of us are lacking an opinion, so let's get to the point where we can share some of those. Anything else you want to add? Let's dig into it. Okay, very cool. Yeah, he sent me a very long bio, and we kind of cut it to what was on the slide. I figured he could tell us about all of that. But please contact Craig if you want more information about database administration. DB2, he's the guy to go to. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to talk about best practices in general. And are they necessary? We're going to define the practice of data administration, database administration, and then talk about what's the value of doing those things. Just real quickly, I'll kind of start is that this is where I start with most of the organizations that I work with. We define best practices, and you can do that relatively quickly around data governance, around data administration. And data governance. And my suggestion is, if everybody has read the book, or knows of the book by Stephen Covey, the seven habits of highly effective people, well, one of those is begin with the end in mind. So I always suggest that we start with the end in mind. We define the best practices, which really kind of define the behavior of the organization. Data administration includes everything associated with the definition, production, and usage of data. So I'm certain that in database administration, there's data modeling, and there's physical database modeling and things like that. And there's some crossover between the two, but really data administration encompasses everything that has to do with the management of data as an asset in our organization. And as I mentioned before, the value of a best practice assessment is that you at least set a target. Instead of doing the ready fire aim approach, we take a ready aim fire approach, and we know what it is that we're trying to address, at least as far as best practice is concerned. Craig, do you agree with those perspectives, or what are your thoughts about that? Yeah, yeah, a lot of good points there, Bob. I think the term best practices is always one that I think is one of those industry buzzwords. And what it means is great, but the actual term, I've always cringed a bit at, like best practices or best of greed tools. I mean, they seem to be a bit boastful. How can you ever really prove that something is best? But that's just niggling at a term. As IT professionals, we're practitioners in the discipline of information technology, and if we're going to engage in any practices, they might as well be the best, right? But getting down to exactly what that means, that can be the fly in the ointment. So what I guess what I'm trying to say is that DBAs need to have good, repeatable processes, and that they can deliver the needs that the business has in terms of administering and managing databases and systems. So yeah, best practices, obviously, they're necessary. And then you're defying database administration. That's something that I took a whole book to do, so I'm not going to read my book to you. But basically, every organization that manages data using a DBMS is going to have to have some kind of an administration group to make sure that the database system itself is used effectively and deploying databases effectively, and that you're writing applications against it appropriately, efficiently, and effectively. So the DBA is basically oftentimes treated as some kind of a technical guru, and they have all these tricks to make databases and systems operate efficiently. But really, those tricks, you go back to it, they're kind of the best practices laid out in terms of processes and scripts that the DBA uses when issues arise. So it kind of goes back to best practices. So what is database administration? I developed kind of an elevator pitch. Someone asked, hey, what's a DBA? I use a simple mnemonic device to help. And I say a database administrator practices keeping the company's databases up to par, where par is an acronym for performance, administration, and recoverability. So the performance of the SQL, the performance of the database structures, the performance of the system software. Then there's the administration, which I guess kind of is in the word database administration, and you're defining the term by another word in the term, and I know you hate that, Bob, but it works for my acronym, so we'll leave it to you. And that's things like design, modeling, change management, data integrity, data movement, and the like. And then finally, there's recoverability. And that makes sure that the database is properly backed up so that it can be available in case you have issues and that you meet your recovery time objectives. I'm guessing that we're just real quickly, just to interject real quickly, as I usually do. I would expect that you would require governance around the performance, around the administration, and especially around the recoverability. Absolutely. And I guess that kind of leads into the next slide, right? Okay, yeah. Let's just go there. Good question, right? Really, that's great. It does. And so when we're talking about best practice, we want to talk about what would be a criteria for best practice. And you know what? I didn't really mean to shut you off or cut you off, but you mentioned that the term best practice makes you cringe or makes you at least think about what is truly best practice. And so maybe it's just that we need to define practices that we can then compare against. Because again, the whole idea, the way that I use best practices is to define that behavior that we want to assess. Would you agree to that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you're talking about, I guess the previous slide, we were talking about how you assess best practices, I kind of have three parts of it. I think the second one, you'll like the best. It has to be goal directed. You can match up with your organization's goal. It has to be minimally invasive. I don't go so far as to say noninvasive. But minimally invasive. And it has to be capable of being evaluated. So you have to be able to have some kind of measurement around to make sure that the practice is actually achieving the goal that is the first part of the three. So goal directed minimally invasive and evaluation capable. Yeah, you know that I would love the minimally invasive part of it because I've heard noninvasive, nonobtrusive, nonintrusive, I've heard it call it everything and another thing as well. The goal directed, those are the things that I really want to get to when we're talking about the criteria of determining whether or not something is best practice. So you said that it needs to have a goal directed. It has to be minimally invasive. And it has to be able to be evaluated. And I think that makes a lot of sense. That really kind of compares to the smart acronym. I don't remember exactly what all the letters of the word smart is. It's a good way to remember things the far way as well. You know, when I go and I try to determine something, if something is best practice around data governance, I use two criteria. And so you use three and I think even the combination of the two would be something that would be valuable to somebody. But the first best practice criteria that I use is that it has to be practical and doable because if we can't achieve it, and I mean maybe that's something that's just understood. But I asked the question, I said, you know, if it's practical and doable, and is it going to add value to the organization? You know, we've got to be able to answer the question. You've got to be able to answer the question, yes. That's the best practice statement. It has to be practical. It has to be doable. It has to add value. But then I also say that if we don't achieve practice, are we putting our program at risk? And the answer again needs to be yes. So we want to make certain that we're not labeling everything a best practice because everything is a practice. But the things that are really best practice or whatever adjective you want to use to describe the best practice, whether it's best or it's corporate practice or whatever it is, in order to limit it to the ones that are most important to the organization, I say that we're going to be at risk if we don't achieve the best practice. Is the same thing true for database practices? Yeah, I think so. I think you make a lot of good points there. I want to back up a little bit to the term governance here. And I understand data governance is an important criteria for organizations. And data governance is required in order for DBAs to do their job appropriately. But then on the slide you kind of couch it in database administration governance. And that term governance is not something that's going to readily register with a DBA. That doesn't mean it isn't applicable and doesn't make sense. It's just that that's not a term the DBAs use.  And Miriam Webster says it's to control, direct, or strongly influence the actions and conduct of. And that makes sense. And so, you know, DBA governance, I guess, if you're going to create it, is the formal control and the exertion of practices that surround the maintenance and health of database systems. So, yeah, DBA governance makes sense. But getting back to what I said right at the beginning here of this slide, excuse me, in order for database administration to be done appropriately, data governance is required. Because for the DBA to be able to do that job appropriately, the output of data governance has to become the input to the service level agreements and recovery time objectives on which the DBAs have to base their decisions for best practices. In other words, if I don't know what this data is, how am I going to be able to accurately determine what the performance should be to it, what its availability should be, and when it goes down, how rapidly the organization needs it to be recovered. So, there's an interplay between data governance and, I guess, what we're calling database administration governance, if you will. Yeah, okay, so you know what, I'd like to kind of switch that around a little bit. So, I understand completely, and I think that's a really good point that you made about database administration and then adding governance to it. I think the same thing is true, that in order for database administration to be successful, that you have to have the governance. But I would say that the opposite holds true as well, that in order for governance to be successful, we have to have darned good database administration. And when you said that the definition I use for governance is the execution and enforcement of authority over the management of data, well, you don't really necessarily need to execute and enforce authority over the DBAs if they do their job. So, the governance of a DBA would be the governance of pretty much any other position as well. I mean, I would think that in that way, that would apply that way. Interesting. Yeah, and the way I always look at it, I guess, is coming from data governance down to DBA, but it can, I guess, make its way the other direction as you're saying. One of the things that DBAs do, I think, is institute policies around physical data implementations that match the organization's data governance policies on the data stored in those databases. So, if you have regulatory issues around the data and that requires auditing, the DBAs have to implement that audit infrastructure in the database system or with third-party tools. And the DBAs are going to be the experts at how that happens, but they can't figure out which tables in which databases require which level of auditing. That has to come from the business. That has to come from the data governance area. And it's kind of that way across the board. There are strong things that DBAs need to do to exert control over the database infrastructure, security policies, that BDA and PAR, part of the administration aspect. The security of who can access what data and how. Sure, the DBAs need to be able to know how to do that and implement it appropriately so that intrusion doesn't happen into the data and you don't have data breaches. But in order to put the right levels of control on the data and make sure the right people are seeing it and not the wrong ones, you have to have that business perspective that only data governance can give to you. Yeah, you know what? They're very tightly related. They're different disciplines, typically, by professional, I would think. And I see it that way in most organizations, but they're so tightly connected. I know that an organization I'm working with now has said, well, we're not going to let people go directly to the DBAs, or we're going to instruct the DBAs to return a request to the data administrators, again, just to kind of govern the relationship between the DBAs and the DAs. Yeah, I think that's probably a good process to instate. You know, one of the things that I see as I go into shops and do DBA health checks and database administration-type things is many times there is no formal DA, and the DBA winds up having to do some part of this and they do it half-assed because they already have a full-time job. They need someone who has more of that business perspective. So, yeah, the DBA needs this input, but you can't rely on the DBA to be the person who is the data architect of the data and the meaning of the data itself. They need to understand it, but they're not necessarily the ones who are going to be able to solicit that information from the business. So, a strong DA is needed, and if you have that, then DBA is going to be better. Right, I agree. I think it's good. I think we can talk about the criteria and about the best practices easily for the hour. I want to get to the additional subjects. I just wanted to hear before we jumped into those, and we've still got a bunch of time left, I'll talk about some specific best practice in the data governance. And so, when I get to asking you to speak about the database administration governance best practices, let's just drop the governance right now, and maybe you can share or think about what would be some database administration best practice examples to share. But the data governance best practice examples that I want to share, and I use these repeatedly in organizations, and they are more around just the management of data as an asset rather than the actual physical management of the database asset. But the first one, and remember the two criteria that I used, and we'll also use the performance administration and recoverability against these, but I don't know if it makes as much sense against the data governance best practices. Maybe it makes more sense against the database administration best practices. But the first one is, there's a high level of senior management support, sponsorship, and understanding. And oftentimes I'll even underline the word understanding because that to me seems to be the most important out of that best practice. You need to have their support. You need to have their sponsorship. They can't really even give you the word sponsorship unless they understand the activities of the governance program. And so, is it practical and doable?  I mean, do you have a high level of senior management support and sponsorship? And do they understand what the heck it is you're doing, how you're going to go about it, what it's going to take in order to do it? Are you going to be at risk if you don't have that support, sponsorship, and understanding? I would say without a doubt you're going to be at risk at some point because somebody's going to be asked to do something that they don't understand where the request is coming from. They don't understand why they should prioritize their time that way. So that's a best practice. And to be honest with you, that's the one that I seem to be used 100% of the time. The second one is written in different ways with a team of cross-departmental resources. Basically, the second best practice is that somebody has to have the responsibility for data governance. So if somebody doesn't have the responsibility, first of all, is it practical and doable? Well, sure. If you can have somebody that's given the responsibility for the program. But the question is, how much time do they really have? And you need to have somebody in the organization that has the responsibility, has the time to manage the program. Without it, you're going to be at risk because nothing's going to get done. It just seems to be common sense. The third one kind of aligns up with when you talked about being able to evaluate, Craig, you talked about the measurements. And I say that it's best practice that we define the measurements of success of the program that we define those and we communicate those with people. Is it practical and doable to do that? Yes, it's practical. Are we going to be at risk if we're not going to be able to measure success? And I would say, without a doubt, we would be at risk if we don't define how we're going to measure the program in the last one. I mean, it's a laundry list of items, the goals, scopes, objectives, roles, metrics, rules of engagement, you know, the team, those things are well-defined and communicated. I mean, to me, is it easy to do that? Well, you can do it by reading a book. You can do it by reading my book. You can do it by reading Craig's book. You can do it by reading somebody else's book. But the fact is that you need to do it. Somebody has to have the responsibility for doing that. And if you don't do that, are you going to be at risk? Yes, because somebody at some point in time is going to want to know what the goals of your governance program are, or what the objectives or what the scope are. So when we talk about data-based administration, Craig, what would you consider to be best practice around data-based administration? You know, kind of like, you can even leave the governance word out of it if you'd like. Sure, okay. And thanks. And I just want to say that I agree with everything you just said, except that you can get it by reading someone else's book. Just kidding, just kidding. Thank you, Ray. You're talking about somebody else's other than mine, right? Go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah. What happened? The understanding part, yeah, that is definitely part of it. And I'm always, there's like this old story that DBA is like to tell where someone, they hired a consultant and went to the CIO and was reporting the results of what the consultant's job was there. And the CIO said, well, yeah, I know we have Oracle here and that we need a DBA, but please don't tell me I need another one. I don't know what they do and they cost too much already. Unfortunately, yeah, that's kind of like the standard out there. Now, when you talk about responsibility, that's understood. So that's good with database administration. Most organizations realize, I've got this enterprise DBMS. I need a DBA or a DBA group to make sure this thing runs appropriately. Now, it's not across the board. There's this thing known as the accidental DBA. And that's mostly in a SQL server world where someone rolls in a SQL server. They didn't plan for a DBA. The person who used SQL server the most becomes the accidental DBA. And that's not a good thing to have happen because then you have to go back and get the understanding and take the responsibility and that becomes an issue. But in terms of best practices, and there's all kinds of different things that you can do, and I don't want to dive down into the weeds and talk about, well, you reorg this database when this happens and there's all kinds of that stuff. But at a high level, it all comes down to service level agreements. Now, depending on the practice at hand, that service level agreement, it can focus on availability. It can focus on performance. Or it can focus on both. And it's vitally important for service level agreements to be created between the DBA group and the business unit that's going to pay for it. And in order to be successful, a service level agreement has to have certain things around it. There's got to be agreement between business and the technicians that what you're trying to do can be accomplished. So you don't want the business users to say, every transaction has to run in microsecond response time. I don't care what I'm requesting.  You've got to sit down, transaction by transaction in some cases, or groups of transactions. Groups of programs, groups of applications, and figure out what the response time is for that application, group, or transaction. The second part of it is you've got to have cost. You have to say, this is what I'm willing to pay as the business unit to get that service level. And if after researching the technology and the requirement, that's not possible at that price negotiation begins, compromise happens, and that's where you have to go back to, I think, what you have on this slide, senior level management. And hopefully you have reasonable senior level management who understands that you can't give 24x7 round the clock sub-second response time to every application at a cost of pennies, right? So the service level agreements need to be in place. Something like 99.5% of the service level agreements 99.9% uptime during the hours of 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays at a price of X or availability. Average response time for transactions will be two seconds or less for workloads of 500 or fewer users. However you write it, whatever the requirements are for the business, then there has to be that cost perspective to it as well. It basically, if you have service levels written appropriately, I also use the term recovery time objectives, which is basically a service level for recovery. If you have these things written and agreed to and practical and well thought out, then performance management and availability becomes predictable, and you'd be able to manage the expectations of everybody involved. If you don't have predefined and agreed upon service level agreements, there's no way the DBA or the end users could know whether or not any of your applications are performing adequately. So whoever calls up and complains the loudest gets the attention instead of being able to look at the service level agreement and look at the statistics in your measurement tool, your performance monitors, what have you, and say we're servicing to the service level, and maybe you're not happy and you need to change the service level, but there's nothing I'm going to spend my time on now to fix a problem that isn't there other than in your mind, go back and renegotiate the service level agreement. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations don't have service level agreements. Well, and you know what, I mean, and so I wish this webinar could go on a lot longer than an hour, and it can't, so we need to really move into the next subjects, but one question I would have, and I guess we really don't have time to answer it, is how could we apply SLA to the field of data governance, and can we create, so we're not really performing the same type of service as data governance as we are DVAs, but if somebody wants to throw a question in there, that'll be great. We'll try to address that a little bit later on. We've got a couple more questions that we want to get to, and we want to leave time for some questions. It looks like there are some questions coming in, but certainly that's the thought is I really like the idea of the service level agreement, and if there's a way to be able to add that to data governance, you know, can we provide a service that is going to be measurable and that there's a cost associated with, it's just a good thought, and it sounds like that's really a very important database administration best practice. There's a cost associated with a certain level of performance, and it's creating information, Craig, so thanks for about that. The second thing I wanted, or next thing I wanted to talk about is, well, all right, so let's say we've defined these best practices, and I think we've come to an agreement, kind of, that the data administration best practices or data governance best practices may be different than database best practices. But one of the things that I typically suggest to organizations is once you have the best practice defined for data governance, we take these six steps, and these six steps are pretty common sense if you think about it. First thing you need to do is you need to be able to define the best practice. The next thing you need to be able to do is compare your present situation to that best practice. And, you know, some organizations can do that themselves. Some organizations need to reach to the outside. I heavily suggest that you reach to the outside. In fact, if you need a name of somebody, we could have to give that to you. But really, you need to do that in comparison of your present practices to these best practices. And then, during that comparison, there's really a couple things that you need to do. You need to identify what exists in your organization that we can leverage and that we can take advantage of to support that best practice. And let's articulate that to the organization that we're already doing these things. And again, the idea, and I talk about non-invasive data governance quite a bit, is to stay as non-invasive as you can. Let's find things that we're already doing and let's maybe not take credit for them, but let's say we can leverage those types of things to achieve the best practice.  And I call them, instead of calling them the negative, things that I said, they're opportunities to improve. So again, it's the way that you articulate them to your organization. So you've compared yourself to this thing that you call the best practice. You've said that we can take advantage of these things. We need to address these things in order for the program to really start in earnest and start moving forward. It's a good idea to articulate the gap between where your present practice is and the best practice. And if you can associate risk to that gap even better. And then I would suggest that those two are kind of connected at the hip. When you have found a gap between what you're doing and what you say you want to be doing from a best practice perspective, identify the risk associated with that, and then use all of that information to deliver your plan. So you really, I said without that, without having the best practice to find and without assessing yourself to that best practice, you're not going to do this even coming thing. You're not going to do the begin with the end in mind.  And your likelihood of delivering a successful program becomes very difficult. So Craig, if you could in a couple of minutes share with me what would, once you've defined your database administration practices, what do you do with those? Are there ways to, how do you make certain that those practices are being followed? Interesting. Yeah, I think that once you're defining best practices, if we dig down into the weeds, DBAs have their whole bags of tricks. It's like, I do this when the database is exhibiting signs that I need to reorganization. I've got a query. I add an index. So there's all these things that DBAs do when there are problems. The issue I think more for DBAs becomes the lack of planning of the organization in terms of being proactive. So there's all these things we do reactively. Someone calls up, there's a problem. And that's when the DBA goes into best practice mode. How do I resolve this problem? How did I do it in the past? Take this script off the shelf, move it and do it. And this is why I go back again to the service level agreements. If you're in proactive mode, you've got the service level agreements and you know what you need to be doing from a best practice perspective. Now, as I mentioned, a lot of organizations don't do this. And I talk to a lot of different companies as part of my consulting practice. A lot of times they ask me, come in and do a health check of our environment. First thing I always ask them is show me your SLAs. And maybe it would shock you, maybe it wouldn't. I don't know. Usually I get a blank look. What? And then I talk about why service level agreements are required and how I really can't come in and say, what's your health like? Other than at a generic level, I can look at system parameters and things. Not why you did that wrong. You did that wrong. Kind of look at that. But not, are you meeting your objectives? Because you don't have any.  And I call that the YBWJ methodology. And that stands for, you bitch, we jump. And that's not the way to run a DBA group. Unfortunately, most of them run that way. So if there was one thing that I could really instill to the attendees here who work with DBAs, are DBAs, manage DBA groups, is to put the focus on service level management, create service level agreements, create recovery time objectives, and have your DBAs manage to that. And then you will be goal-oriented, minimally invasive, and I guess we'll talk about measurement on the next slide, right? Yeah, you know what? I've never had the problem of having an R-rated webinar before, but it's good. I like your acronym of YBWJ, because it seems as though that's repeated within organizations, that that's the way the DBAs are in responsive mode all the time. And again, if there's a way to be able to bring SLAs into the data governance world, because I've seen organizations from a data governance perspective that kind of act the same way, the only time that they think data governance needs to get involved is when there's a problem that we need to address. So the DAs jump into the YBWJ mode, and they help to resolve the issue. And if we can take a more proactive stance, that's not thinking that SLAs may be something to consider to add to the data governance best practices that I mentioned earlier, because we want to improve things in general. And you're improving your performance, improving people's ability to analyze the data, improving people's ability to be able to make decisions. But I think that's really great. I think the things that you said, and again, taking it back to the SLAs are important. And yeah, I would think that if you ask questions, that there are some organizations that have SLAs, but not all. So it's something that organizations should consider. So we're going to address one more issue here, and then we're going to open the door for some questions.  So once we've defined these best practices around data administration, around data-based administration, we've got to find a way of being able to measure, I guess the SLAs would be a great example of something that you could measure against. In fact, you're measuring against it 100% of the time. So that would be, I'm guessing that you're going to kind of jump back to that in your response. You know, what I suggest, and I'm talking to you, Craig, the ways to measure the results of governance is, there's a couple different ways. One is through strict business value. Another one is through the acceptance of data governance into the organization. So a lot of times it's a change of culture. I talked to an organization today where they're talking about going through a major cultural shift because they want to manage data as a valuable asset of the organization. Well, we need to be able to demonstrate some measurable sign of value to us doing that. But we also want to be able to say, okay, we've educated 10% of the people in the organization, 20%, 30%. We want to be able to recognize that we haven't gotten to everybody yet, and we want to make sure that we do get to everybody. You know, I talked earlier about a future webinar being that everybody is a data steward and that people need to deal with it. Well, the fact is that everybody in the organization that has a relationship to the data should be held accountable for that relationship to the data. To me, that's the basis of non-invasive data governance. So if we're going to expect to hold them to being accountable for their relationship to the data, we need to educate them on the impact that they have on that information across the organization. So it's not just the business value. That's very important. We need to be able to measure what governance is doing for us. But we also need to be able to define for our organizations what the acceptance of governance in the organization. I added to these ways to measure. I added the quality of the data, the protection of the data. Those are certainly things that you need to be able to measure. I mean, you need to be able to be able to measure the quality of your data. You need to define a standard for your data. Have something to compare it to. So if you're going to compare what's right to what's wrong, you've got to know a clear definition of what's right. And that's really creating a standard around the quality of the data. And again, in the fact I spoke to these folks earlier today, that they want to focus on protecting the data. There's not a choice. The government's not coming to you and saying that you, you know, protect the data if you want. Or they're not putting regulatory and compliance controls and classification rules and things like that. He is saying, you know, comply if you want. They're telling you that you have to. So being able to measure your level of compliance, measure your level of protection.  But if you've had breaches in the past, you can measure against that now.  We can, you know, protect our data a little bit better. So from a data governance perspective, in my opinion, it seems very important that we, you know, define these ways of measuring the results, but don't just limit it to business value. Take it beyond business value because that's difficult to define. I'm not meaning to steer away from it because it's difficult, but it's difficult to be able to articulate in dollars and cents. I've seen clients try to do that where they say, you know, we or return to mail cost our organization X number of dollars. So if we govern the data around the addresses, we can save X number of dollars. Well, that's great, but I think you also need to measure the acceptance of data governance. I would think that would be somewhat different when it comes to database administration, though, right? So how do you measure the performance of a DBA, I guess, or maybe just database administration in general? Yeah, that's a loaded question. And I think you can talk about measuring the performance of the database environment. And again, you were spot on. I'm going to go back to SLAs a bit. You know, when you have them, then DBAs can adjust resources and apply them to the most important critical applications and costs get controlled. Capital is expended on the pieces of the business that are going to be the most important to the business, and that can be measured at a business level. There are several other ways you can measure it, you know, with service level agreements, recovery time objectives that match business goals, then there's less of this hair on fire problem solving mess and more of DBAs and management discipline. So the phone should ring less. There should be fewer tickets raised in the help desk system. And these are things that can be measured. Now, how do you measure against the SLAs? Well, then you either need to use the components of the DBMS that allow you to do that if they're there. And if not, you need to augment your environment with performance monitoring and management solutions. And there are a slew of companies out there that will help you do that with recovery tools that can speed up your backup, speed up your recovery, perform different types of recovery. So these tools are there that can, number one, help you to meet the goals. Number two, measure that the goals are being met so that when you get the person following YBWJ complaining, you have the measurement in your monitor that says, no, we are actually managing to the service level and if it's a problem, the service level has to change. So basically, if you get the tools in place, the service level agreements and the recovery time objectives instituted appropriately and correctly, then you've got to better manage database infrastructure. There are fewer problems. It's going to cost less. And these are things that reflect on the bottom line. And in general, a less stressful environment. And who wouldn't want that?  So I got used to that growing up. That acronym that you shared earlier really made a lot of sense.  It could almost, in a large organization, at least from what you're saying, it sounds like it could almost be turnover and DBAs. It could be an indication of the fact that they don't want to live in this YBWJ environment, hair on fire environment where they're always running after the fire truck. So to me, it seems to make sense that there's things around the database administrator's performance, but then also even just keeping them around, because DBAs are really hard to find. And they're very valuable to organizations. If you don't create an environment where there's improvement and there's really best practice around data and data management and they're always chasing their tails, you're going to lose your DBAs. Would you agree with that? Yeah, yeah, I would. It's funny. Sometimes people who've known me for a long time ask me, what are you doing for a living now? And they say, remember what I used to do? Now I talk about it. And that's basically... The phone doesn't ring at 2 o'clock in the morning when you're talking about it. So that is one of the things that made me not want to be a 50-plus-year-old DBA waking up at 2 in the morning to solve problems. Hey, if you're telling people you're age, and I already told them earlier that we graduated at the same year, then you're giving my age away too. Please don't do that. All right, so we're at 2.47. You're not fooling anyone. And we've only got... Go ahead. What did you say? I just said, you're not fooling anyone. So we're coming to the end of the webinar. We've got 13 minutes left and Shin and I... I'm getting ready to turn it over to you as far as the Q&A is concerned. I see that there's been a lot of good questions. Just real quickly, I wanted to wrap up, and thank you for taking the time to attend the webinar. I mean, it's been really interesting. I've enjoyed the kind of conversational perspective. If you like that, please let us know that that's cool too, because it's always interesting to throw a curveball at these real-world data governance webinars and keep them interesting for you. So we talked about the criteria for determining what's best practice. Craig shared the par. I shared the... I don't think I have an acronym for it, but it has to be practical and doable, and it has to follow best practice. Or it has to be... You'll be at risk if you don't achieve it. We talked about evaluating your organization against the best practice and the process for that, how to maximize the value of an assessment, steps to take after completing the best practice, and then finally, really, the measuring the results of your best practice approach. So with that, besides for thanking Craig again, I'd like to turn it over to Shannon and see if we have any questions. We certainly do, and you know one of the most common questions that we receive is people asking if they're going to get a copy of the slides in a recording. And just a reminder, I will send a follow-up email by end of day Monday for this particular webinar with links to the slides, the recording, and any good other information requested throughout the webinar. So let me get to the questions here. So go ahead and feed the slides back to the criteria outline. Should all three criteria be answered yes before considering something as a best practice? Is that a question? That's a question for Craig, because I listed two criteria. So Craig, why don't you take a swing at that from a database perspective? Sure. Yeah, I think the three criteria he's talking about is that it should be goal-directed, it should be minimally invasive, and it should be capable of being evaluated. I think for the best best practice, all three should be yes. I think number one and number three are almost have to be yes, and number two, I think depends on, as a consultant, you have to say it depends, right? It's going to depend on how much you're willing to change your organization, because if it's not minimally invasive, that means it's somewhat invasive or very invasive. So in order to institute the best practice, you have to be willing to break down the organization and institute the new best practice, and you have to be willing to spend money, because when something is invasive, it necessarily is going to involve work in order to get it implemented. So if number two of those three is not a resounding yes, then there's more work to be done, but that doesn't mean that it's not potential to implement as a best practice. I'm really glad you say that, because the minimally invasive, I mean, when I talk about noninvasive, the idea is to stay as noninvasive as you can, but if there's a period where it has to be invasive, then you've got to be invasive, because some of the things just have to be done, and I would think that would hold true from the DVA perspective as well. Absolutely. All right, Shannon. Are there any of you familiar with the CMMI data maturity model framework, and if so, how does that fit into all of this? I'm sorry, can you say that again real quickly? I'm sorry. Are there any of you familiar with the data maturity model framework, and if so, how does that fit into all of this? All right, so I'll touch on it, Craig, real quickly. Yeah, I'm familiar with it if you're talking about the CMMI, the capability maturity model institutes, DMM that they just produced. How does that fit into all of this? Well, database administration is certainly a part of managing your data assets, so when it comes to data management maturity, if you don't have strong DVA, then you're not going to achieve well in the data management maturity model. It's related, and I think that if you don't have strong data administration, it's going to be very hard to have successful database administration, so it's all tied together. I think that the framework is not just taking kind of one step backward, but it's taking, I don't mean backward, but taking one step higher. It's even actually a couple steps higher where you're looking at the overall framework of the maturity of an organization to be able to manage its data. Craig, you haven't thought on that? Yeah, I mean, I'm familiar with capability maturity models. I haven't seen the data one, I think way back in the 90s, when I was a gardener, I took a short stab at trying to come up with something that would be data focused, but the problem I've always had with what I saw, and again, I'm commenting on something I haven't seen. So I think that, as you said, it's several layers up, so I think it's kind of subjective, and you wind up with things like, is this an organization that's very mature and not very mature? What are all of the criteria that go into that so that you can grade it appropriately? And I haven't seen any of these capability maturity models that really dive down into the weeds to give what then could be a mark that gets translated into, are we mature or immature? But then maybe that's just my DBA perspective, where I really want everything laid out in zeros and bits and bytes. Hey, I remember seeing your data management maturity model back in the old TDAN days. Or TDAN, I actually had published it on TDAN, but it's great. So it's the same people that created the CMM, who created the DMM around Carnegie Mellon and the Software Engineering Institute, but it's now its own institute. And it's good. If people want to take a look at it, it's a comparable framework to things like the demo one and the EDM model, Enterprise Data Model or Enterprise Data Management Model. They all have frameworks, but I think they all include database administration and they all include data administration as well. I love it. I love that you guys are familiar with that. And we certainly have some webinars on the DMM. So for more information there, so the next question is should data governance be an independent department group of its own or should it be part of the IT departments such as with DBA groups? That's one of the age-old questions and I get that question often at different organizations. And my answer to the question is usually yes. It needs to exist somewhere. It doesn't necessarily have to exist in... I mean, a lot of people will tell you that it should reside in the business area and there are some people that don't even go as far as saying that if you have it in IT, it will not be successful. I'm not one of the people that say that. I say that as long as there is an alignment and there's a relationship, a strong working relationship, a partnership, so to speak, between IT and business, your data governance needs to reside somewhere. Oftentimes it may fall under the chief data officer, the chief risk officer, the chief information officer if they're really playing the role of a chief data officer. Craig, do you have any opinion as to where data governance should reside in an organization? Yeah, I guess. I think that my bias would be that if it is in the business, there is generally a greater chance for it really to have authority. If it's just in... And again, it depends on organizations and I'm sure you've seen organizations where it's in IT and it's work. And I'm not saying you can't, but I just think that the business which controls the purse strings, usually IT is a cost center, whereas businesses earn money for the organization and contribute to the bottom line. And if those organizations that contribute to the bottom line buy off, the data governance is important in something you're going to do as an organization, I think that gives it a little bit more cloud than if it's in IT. And I've worked at organizations and this was before the term data governance was anything, but there was data administration and the first time they needed to lay people off, it was the poor DA's that got it and I think that was a backward decision and that they were in IT. And I think the agreement is that it needs to exist somewhere. Yeah. And it really depends on the organization and IT. I just won't rule out IT as a possible place to have it. It really depends on the relationship with the business folks. So far as no outside evaluation or validation has been mentioned, when is that necessary to properly scrutinize the effectiveness of the program? Well, what I've heard is that oftentimes people within the organization are wrong in certain areas, but they're not listened to. And so there are some organizations that they require going to the outside and having an outside consultant tell them that they're not good at this because an inside person telling them that they're not good at this is not enough. So if you pay, we pay good money to hire a consultant to tell us that we're not good at this and then that's going to resonate with people and so be it. But if you have the strength and you can articulate it and you have somebody who has the responsibility for this and they're being listened to, then it's not necessarily absolutely necessary to go to the outside. It's good to maybe validate that against somebody from the outside, but the fact is that if you're able to do it yourself, more power to you. It makes a lot of sense. But oftentimes the person from the outside has a lot of expectations that you may not be considering internally within your organization or that you may have not experienced with other organizations. Craig, you agree that is the same hold true from the database administration that the consultants come in? Is there a need for outside evaluation or is internal evaluation necessary? That's always necessary. Yeah, I agree that it depends. The first thing I do after I've asked where the SLAs is I will take DVAs aside and interview them one by one asking them what do you think is wrong? What are your biggest problems? Generally that's the biggest information that I get on the consulting engagement. And a lot of times they'll tell me what they think should be done to fix it. So me, it's not always that simple, but sometimes it's sit down, listen, evaluate what they're saying if it makes sense, write it up and tell the organization do this and the DBA will be happy someone's telling them to do what they've been trying to get done anyway. So there's that to it. The other aspect of it is even when it's not that simple organizations can become very insular and do things a certain way just because they've been down a certain way from that outside perspective that a consultant can bring to the task. We've worked at multiple organizations seen things done multiple different ways seen things right, seen things long and a lot of times you don't get all of that exposure when you work only at a single company or even a couple of companies as you draw the line. Tom, I'm going to turn it back to Shannon and to wrap up. But thanks Craig. I appreciate your being a lot. I think people found this to be interesting to find it to offer the different perspective. I really appreciate your participation in this. Happy to have been here. It was enjoyable, had a lot of fun. All right. And thanks to both of you. It was a great discussion and really appreciated. And thanks as always to our attendees who are so engaged in everything we do. We love the questions coming in for the webinar. And just a reminder, you can see Bob at Enterprise Data World and in June at Data Governance and Information Quality in San Diego. If you're not registered for EDW yet, it is actually sold out. But you can order the... we'll be presenting 50 of the top videos that are available for purchase. And again, Bob and Craig, thank you so much for this great presentation and I hope everyone has a great day. All right. Thanks, Shannon.


Today, we start off with a new jet coach, Adam Gase. And you know, when he got let go by the Dolphins, one of us on the show said, Watson, Jets will hire him in a totally frivolous way and sarcastic way. And you know what? They hired him, a guy with an under 500 record who got fired by a team in the division, and you had to have him. Now, for all reports, if you believe what's being said and tweeted and written, he was the second choice behind Ja Rule. Ja Rule wanted his own assistance. No, it's not Ja Rule. No, Matt Rule. Matt Rule, I'm sorry. But I love the Ja Rule reference by you. So it goes to Adam Gase. 40 years old, supposedly a quarterback whisperer, had great success with Peyton Manning in, you know, one of the years in Denver, Peyton Manning, 5,500 yards and 55 touchdowns. Not too many interceptions.  Peyton Manning was great in Hall of Fame bound while he was in Indianapolis. Well, who benefited from that? Gase. The Denver Broncos. Right. And Gase was available and the Broncos needed a head coach. You never looked at him. And then you look at him. And I'm sorry, you can't take credit for anything Peyton Manning does late in his career. Peyton Manning came back strong after the injury and then eventually it started to catch up with him age and the neck injury and wasn't nearly the same quarterback. I'm not going to try to devalue Gase, all right? Maybe he'll turn out to be a great hire. We'll see. But from the resume, what exactly do I get excited about? Under 500 coach, lost the only playoff game he's ever been in, all right? You say quarterback whisperer, but there isn't a lot of evidence that he did anything with Ryan Tannehill. Now if you want to say Tannehill stinks. The first year, they made the plus. He was 10 and six and Tannehill missed the second year and Tannehill played 11 games this year. Understood, but it's still kind of open for debate exactly how much of a quarterback whisperer he is. He did a good job with John Fox and Cutler in Chicago. Cutler had a pretty good year cut down his interceptions and we'll talk to John Fox later. It's one thing having a good year with a quarterback that had already been established like a Peyton Manning like a Jay Cutler. But what about a quarterback young in his second year and developing him into a great quarterback? The reason I'm kind of arguing about it, Michael, is because no one wanted to give Mike McCarthy any credit. All right, 13 years in the NFL, nine years to the playoffs. Oh, well, he had Aaron Rodgers. He didn't have anything to do with Aaron Rodgers. Aaron Rodgers was great, but we're gonna ignore that. But, well, look what Gase did with Peyton Manning. Look what Gase did with Cutler. Look what Gase did with Tannehill. And Teebo. And Teebo, so you're just being convenient. You want to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to and ignore what you want to ignore. But the fact is if you want, if experience was important, McCarthy had more experience than Gase. So did Caldwell. But if experience was important, why was rule your number one choice who had almost no experience, but you shied away from him because he wanted his own assistance? Which, by the way, I think coaches should be allowed to pick their own assistants. The goal of the Jets is to say we have to pick the assistants for you. Right, so I'm not saying that it's a failure because I don't know. It could turn out to work, but my frustration level, if you're a jet fan is, he wasn't your first selection and if you love all the little things about Gase, then what was it about McCarthy you didn't like? Because I think McCarthy has done more in the NFL than Gase has.  Why, because he came from your own division. He coached in the AFC as compared to McCarthy you coached in the NFC. I'm not really sure. We'll see how it ends up working out. But it sounds to me like Peyton Manning made a phone call to Chris Johnson and Chris Johnson was floored by the endorsement. Yeah, if you're Chris Johnson and you haven't been in football that long and all of a sudden you pick up the phone and Peyton Manning's on the other end, that could be a little bit of a sway but Peyton Manning also made that call to Cleveland and John Dorsey said thanks, but no thanks. Didn't even consider Adam Gase. So all of a sudden Peyton Manning's so concerned about the Jets hiring his guy. Meanwhile, he had two chances to be a jet and passed on both of them. Right. Because he could have left Tennessee early when the Jets had the first overall pick, said no. And then could have signed with them as a free agent in 2012 and said no. But are you ready? Is everyone geared up for these stat that will excite you about Adam Gase? You ready? This is a big stat. Michael, you ready? Yeah. You sure? I think so. Here's the reason the Jets had to get Adam Gase. You're not gonna believe us. Listening close to your radio. Everyone roll up your windows. Tell everyone in the car to be quiet. Put out the blunt and lean forward for a second. Adam Gase as a head coach, five and one against the New York Jets. Do you believe that? No. It's unbelievable. How could you beat the Jets five out of six times? How could you do that? And here's what's even better. He has this astounding record of five and one against the Jets. And there's only one team in the league that you're guaranteed to no longer play. Only one. The New York Jets. And they're touting this. Oh, he was five and one against the Jets. Well, if it was five and one against the Patriots, that alone is reason to sign a guy as your head coach. Five and one against Aia team, let's be honest, is lousy. That's why you needed a new head coach in the first place. And number two, you're never gonna play again. Why do people keep saying this?  Five and one against the Jets. I mean, you want me to go over a list of other people, five and one against the Jets? Also, you were five and one against the Jets and Todd Balls was the head coach, and Todd Balls got fired because he wasn't good enough. Well, so what are we talking about?  Bill Belichick is 233 and six against the Jets. What does it matter? Joe gets 88 and two against the Jets. But those would be good hires by the Jets. Fantastic. Yeah, they would. There's other things that consider the bank a little nervous about Gays. Little prickly with the media in Miami. How's it gonna be in New York? Especially as rabbit ears, when it comes to what fans say, how's it gonna be in New York? See, that's a good thing for us, though. I'd take prickly over flat line. We have audio of them, you wanna hear it? Sure. No, no! Actually, no, here, this was something that I used on E&N a while ago when he got annoyed. You guys don't remember this. In mid-October, Gays got annoyed of people talking about Ryan Tannehill's injury. I don't know, I think there's some kind of like a hippo law or something like that that can't talk about. I don't know. I don't sit there and ask him all these questions and I just know the guy couldn't go today, all right? Go ask him. Tired of answering this question about this guy. I got it, but you know what? I'm over it. Me and him, we know that he's not right right now, okay? The details of it, we'll keep that to us. You guys don't need to know that. Oh, good for you! Now, let's listen to Adam Schefter. Adam was on with Alan Hahn, right when the news broke. Yeah, that was perfect for him. Should the Jets be concerned with issues in Miami? There have been a number of issues in Miami. It goes beyond the head coach. And I think what Adam showed there, sometimes he got very impatient with some of these players and wanted to move on from some of these guys when things didn't go his way. He's a tough, demanding guy. And there were certain guys that weren't doing things the way that he wanted done. And so we saw them ship out a number of players. I think that they got talent. They got the most out of their talent. And the Jets believe that this guy will be a plus for this franchise, otherwise you don't make the move. Now, Cameron Wolff covers the Dolphins. So obviously he has a great insight when it comes to Adam Gase. And supposedly Gase did not have a great relationship with his players. So let's hear Wolff on that. Some of his outdoing in Miami was just being able to have that cool relationship with players when things are going rough. And he would have some ruffled feathers with certain players if their personality didn't gel with what he intended for his roster. So he wants a certain culture. And if guys don't fit in that, he's not afraid to jettison them, no matter what side of the ball they're on. Now, this was on Hardesty's show yesterday. Wolff went on to say the players had mixed feelings about Gase. There were some players that really loved him that raved about his genius. Frank Gore, Halberd Wilson, they all talked about how intelligent he was, the play caller, how much they thought they could get out of that offense with him. But then there were other players who felt like maybe he chose favorites. If you weren't one of his guys, then maybe you got a different accountability spectrum overall. So I think there was mostly a few points of Gase. And I think that he probably has to learn some lessons for how he handles things for his Miami days. I'm not sure if he's already learned those or he will learn those in the running. But I think the fact that he had a lot of personal control in Miami, the fact that he had pretty much to say that the word with all to do whatever he wants was a little bit of a hindrance for him. And it prevented him from being successful in Miami at the end. Well, he's not going to have that. Well, see, that's the problem. Right. To me, you can't compliment him by saying it's his way of the highway. If he didn't like a player, he would genocin them. That's not going to work here because he's not going to have the power to do that. Because Mike McAgnan's going to have the power to let players go or not. So is he going to have the kind of relationship with McAgnan where he can go to McAgnan and say, listen, I'm having a problem with Robbie Anderson. He's not listening to me, showing up late for practice. I want to cut him. I want to make a statement to the rest of the team. And McAgnan say, no, we're not cutting him. We're going to make him stay. That then takes his power away. Plus, the way the jet structure is, I don't know if Gates can even go to McAgnan and say that. Because the power structure, at least what we were told is, he would then call Johnson and say, I want to get rid of Robbie Anderson. And Johnson would talk to McAgnan. But he's not going to have that power. And also, in terms of the ability to deal with the owner, there are reports that he had a very contentious relationship toward the end with Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of the Miami Dolphin. So now he's going to deal with a guy who's essentially been running the Jets for about a year and a half, and Christopher Johnson. So this was not the slam dunk hire. This was not the winning the press conference hire. This was not making your fan base feel good hire. Remember, I asked Ira from Staten Island, would your head explode? Hard Gates, he said, yeah, I'd be very upset. Hopefully it explodes on the air. That would be good for ratings. Again, I don't want to knock it, because I didn't interview them. And maybe they see something that I don't. So good luck. I hope it works out. I'm just not really sure what I see, from what I'm allowed to see, and what's exposed to us, that really floats my boat about the hire. Maybe they saw something that I don't see. But all the positives that I hear people say about Gates, I'm not sure it's going to apply here, especially his ability to bring in players and genocide players that aren't his type of guys. Is he going to have the power to do that?


Yo, yo, yo, man, so, hey, man, HHF. HHF. Hey, man, y'all, if the champ didn't come, I don't know what's going on.  Good, I'm good, man. Man, so, so, give me a spill on HHF, man, from your perspective, man. What do you do with HHF? I'm the president and national spokesperson for the hip opportunity, James C.B. Gray, and I'm honored to have this opportunity by Brother Ken Ivey, AKA Ken Pippa Ken, you know. So, I'm just, it's a pleasure, it's an honor, and I'm just happy to be here and do the work, you know. Wow. So, how long have you been with HHF? I've been with HHF from the beginning. Okay. In this capacity as president and national spokesperson for the last two and a half months. Wow, that's heavy, man. So, when you first got into it, what was the main thing that drew you to it? Oh, first of all, Brother Ken, you know, I had been doing business with him, you know, before this, working with the books and working with other deals and things like that. So, we had already had a business relationship, and he told me about the blueprint and everything, and I said, listen, whenever you're ready for me, let me know, and I'll be there. So, when he came and said, okay, it's time, I said, I was already locked in. I was already following and monitoring everything, so I knew how to get right in. I've been in the music industry for years, you know, as an A&R, as I get it, ran labels as a consultant, and then on the political side of things, you know, as a sitting politician right now, and a political consultant. So, it's like the best of both worlds for me and also being on the business side of things for a long time as well.  So, how many, you're on the East Coast, so how many members are up here on the East Coast? About 120, right now. Okay. That's big, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and you're international. I heard Dax in.  I don't wanna miss your name. My name is Vado. Vado, man. V-A-D-L, yeah. Is this an African dialect? No, you know, actually Vado means the DJ is here. I'm a DJ, I'm a former DJ. Okay. So, when you say DJ Vado, meaning like the DJ's in the house. You know what I'm saying? It's an African thing, you know. It's actually from Togo, you know. That means the DJ's in the house. That means I'm here. Wow. Yeah. So how did you end up with HHL?  And then like that was like two and a half years ago. And I actually met Ken through a friend of mine. He told me that Ken needed some assistance. Become a videographer, I'm a director. So, and I'm a graphic designer. Wow. I needed some assistance on the graphic part of the media part. So that's why I came in. Wow. So you, when you think of HHL, I mean, is that, is things going on in Africa and other countries with HHL? Yeah, you know, we actually have a chapter in Nigeria. Wow. We have a chapter in Cameroon. And then we have a chapter in 80, you know what I'm saying? And you know, that's, you know, that's just the beginning. Yes, just the beginning. You know, Africa is very, very big. And, you know, I'm a CEO of HHL Africa too. So. Man, stop it. He's smiling when he's saying that. Man, that's big, man. Like, I really, when I first talked to Ken about the whole HHL movement, man, it was just seeing people connect, brothers connecting like that. I had to respect it, man. So I'm so proud to even be affiliated with you guys, man. And that's why it's big, man, when you can come into something and see brothers connected. And you know how I am about it. I was like, man, brothers connected. All in, man, because we just, you don't see it a lot. You know what I mean? But to even the work that the HHF, the hip hop fraternity that shows the unity, man, it's just powerful to me. So man, big ups, man. Thank you. Not only just connecting, but showing everybody that you can be a boss and how to educate each other because some people are so stuck in their regular routines of what they do and they're comfortable in their life, not knowing there's elevation in everything and being able to reach back and help somebody else to come up. And that's what I like about it as well. And you talk about having it in Africa, but how many more chapters are you trying to even branch out from that chapter?  So, you know, Africa is really big. So we can have as many as, you know, as we can as people can tap in and, you know, get to know the HHF, you know, follow the vision and just spread the word out. And do you keep the vision exact, or should I say not the vision, but do you keep the program exactly the same in each country? Because, you know, how sometimes when people franchise things out or have different chapters, it's a little bit different because of the culture, because of who you're dealing with. So is it gonna change a little bit because of that? You know, our core value is a lot of peace and respect. You know what I'm saying? That means that, you know, that can go anywhere, international. You can be in Mexico, talk about love, peace and respect. I mean, Africa, talk about. So the message, that core message always gonna be the same. But now there gonna be some culture, flavor in there that you add to it. For example, Nigeria, that different culture, different flavor, all the country got different. But the main core is peace, love, and respect, you know. Yeah, okay. All right, let me get to it now. So, Ice, man, what's going on, man? You, when you hear about the hip hop fraternity, whether, I know, so Ken, he done broke it down to me. You know, your advice was valuable, like in building HHF, what did you say to Ken that was so influential? Well, the first actual hip hop fraternity would be Zulu Nation, out of New York City. Bambatta and Africa Islam, the guy that put me on, they created a union of rappers out of New York that called themselves the Zulu Nation, which was a spin-off from the Black Spades, which was a gang.  So, they kinda turn into an anti-gang when they say you come in peace or leave in pieces. We gonna be serious. And then you hear groups like Tricall Quest. A lot of groups, you know, were a part of the Zulu Nation, the Jungle Brothers, of course, SoulSonic Force, but a lot of the Bronx rappers were part of the Zulus. And it's really just a shout out. It's not like they're exchanging money, they're the same, we're all on the same team. So, I was really intrigued with that where it was like a union of rappers that all say we under the same umbrella, we cool. And I saw that as power. So, I went to LA, but like you were saying as far as cultural, LA is a little bit too street for the term Zulu, that is culturally not gonna work in LA. LA got a gang culture. So, I studied Lucky Luciano, who created a thing called the Commission, which was a group of the five families, the mob families. And they made a decision to say, hey, look, we all gangsters, but before we fight, we are willing to sit down. The bosses of each family agreed to a sit down. And that way, we can stop a lot of these gang wars.  I was like, if they were able to do this and these are all gangsters and killers, I can do this with rap. So, I took part Zulu Nation, part commission, and I created this thing called the Rhyme Syndicate in Los Angeles, which had everybody from Cypress Hill to Dub C and all these different people. Anybody that wasn't in NWA or part of the NWA family, meaning Cube and all snooping on them were syndicate members, they were groups on top of groups. So, the rule is I'm not in charge of nothing. Like Kenny's not in charge of anything in the hip hop fraternity. All the groups of subdivisions all have their own bosses, but there's only one agreement. Before we fight, we talk, right? And we talk to the bosses. That's it. Now, Kenny said, well, I wanna do something hip hop fraternity. I said, well, this is basically the way you set it up. You don't try to be the boss, you don't try to control. You're the founder, but you, my brother from Nigeria, Kenny doesn't have any pull over him. He just says, this is what we wish. And he is up to him to bring it to his team. Also, hip hop fraternity doesn't make any money. At this moment, I said, you got, that's the best time to build a unit of people when there's no money. Cause when the money comes in, that's when the division comes in. That's real. That's when everybody, so right now this thing really just operates in a way to help each other. That's all it is.  In the actual hip hop fraternity, I told them just a minute ago, what they need is a hit. That's real. They need to start. But here's the question. When that group hits, will they rep the hip hop fraternity? Exactly.  You see what I'm saying? That's the question. Will they be loyal? When I broke from syndicate, I was loyal and I got Everlast, the record deal. I got Donald D, the record deal. I got Divine Styler. Whether those groups were big or hit or what. Lord Finesse, I signed Lord Finesse. So all those groups, I was able to help. So the question is, as the hip hop fraternity starts to morph and gain power, how that power is shared amongst the units. Because any one of the units of the hip hop fraternity can hit. Something can happen. The Texas chapter can say, hey, we have this opportunity to build this, that doesn't affect everybody, but it still reps the name and the name moves up. You see? So it's a question of, it's still an experiment. Is will loyalty remain once the money does come? That's the big question. Cause I've interviewed a lot of people and that's the thing that most of these guys with the record label, the new young, the new people, the new guys are saying, you don't know nobody until they get money. Once they get the money, as you was just talking about, that's where the, that's where, hey, what's going to happen at this point? But here's something. The hip hop fraternity is not a record label. It's not even management organization. It's just a group of friends that have all trying to, and my whole thing was why compete? We all going in the same direction.   Cause you can go out and buy anybody's record and buy the other person's record at the same time. You don't not buy another record because another record is out. Ain't nobody running out of money. You just don't like these other motherfuckers. That's why you didn't buy it. So the theory of my record dropping on the same day as 50 cent, it doesn't mean I won't sell. If my record is just as good, it's going to sell. So the competitiveness is something that's really petty.  It's not even necessary because everybody can eat in this business, but you got to have a hit record. So I think as the hip hop fraternity merges into other levels, I think the real next move is hip hop fraternity DJs. But Vado says to where now you start to control what people hear. You got a lot of artists, but now how many DJs can you place in the clubs to where you guys now have a little bit of power to where you actually can control what's being heard? Wow. Radio is harder, but the clubs you can pretty much get a hip hop. Controller infect them with some of the people from your clique. The man. The man himself, man. Mr. Key and I, right? I got it. I got it. I have a question. Feisty. No, because you said it's a brotherhood of friends who are helping each other. So there's a common goal, but so that mean there's no contracts? No. That anybody is starting to say that you have to do this or anything at all? Because each unit is self-contained. I don't know. There might be a chapter where you sign contracts, but we're not in control of anybody's unit. Okay. Like Vado said, peace, love and respect, that's what it's based on. It's organized, but it's organized in a way that it's like cells, different cells run different things, different ways. Now somebody could report back and say, hey, the Virginia chapter's out of pocket. They charge us, they doing this, they doing that. And who knows, Kenny might say, wait, man, they not really representing how we want to move, so they might be excommunicated. Terminated. But the object really is for all these cats that want to make it in business, in show business, to have an outlet. The thing is there's management, there's production, there's video, there's TV. There's a lot of chances you can get if you have a team, if you have people that you can access and they'll come and help you. The same way we were able to get you guys to come here, that's part of the power of hip hop fraternity. So it's a great thing. And I've always thought that rappers should have a union and have something where they connected better than just everybody being by themselves. It blew my mind when I heard about it because I was like, man, so you telling me nobody has, you've patented down so I can say this. Remember, we talked about that. I'm like, nobody has done nothing with that word hip hop fraternity. He's like, nah, that's our own. I'm like, man, that's big because you would have thought somebody, let me bring you in right. My guy, man, Ken Ivan, listen, man. Well, you know, everything has its embryo stages. Yeah, yeah. So not too many people can say that they're personal friends with Iced T. I know his wife, I know his kids, you know? I mean, he's just a good person, man, and the wisdom that he have. And you interview him today. You see how sharp he is, how he got a photographic memory. How he could rap about something he rapped about 30 years ago. So can you imagine being a fly on the wall with Iced T?  So a lot of times, you know, a lot of people don't know the reason why I quit pyramid. Honestly, it's because I saw Iced T at the players ball and I seen that he gave somebody, told somebody they could either take the grenade or the record deal and that just changed my life. That's my favorite story. That changed the whole trajectory of my life. So, you know, calling Iced T and, you know, him advising me and he talking about the rap center kid and telling me all these other rap stories and stuff that I've been hearing for the last 25 years, I just thought it would be fitting, you know, for us to bring brothers together. You know, I know Iced T can't be an active participant. You know, he has law and order.   So with a think tank, what happens is we all be able to compare each other's notes. You know, I know you heard the infamous story about Pete Diddy and Master P being on the plane and Master P said, how much it costs? He said 30,000, he asked Pete Diddy, how much he said 30,000. Both of them was paying $30,000 for the same flight. Well, that's the record business, you know what I'm saying? 15% of royalties, why the record labels get 85% of the royalties. So what that means is if you made a million dollars for the record company, you would get 150,000 and the record company would get 850,000. But if you got somebody like me or Iced T or like James or like Vado can say, hey man, listen. Like Iced, he said, you know, in one of our documentaries, he said, I'm here to let brothers know, don't go down there, there's trouble down there. So, you know, that's what the hip hop fraternity is. We like, we throw alarm clock in the gray yard.  So, you know, so that's the Iced Reportable. Let me say something. Let me say something. Just being able, you know, like I meet people, I say, I'm not an agent manager or record laborer, I'm a consultant. And just being able to consult with certain people or having that phone number that you can call to ask a question.  You don't even understand how just having that connection, I'll give you a really quick example.  On a favorite nation's deal, everybody on that album gets the same exact check. Everybody. So I got my royalty for one of my payments was 25,000 but I'm friends with Big Daddy Kane. He's on that album. Me being able to tell Kane, I got 25 Gs. His label was telling him something different. See what I'm saying?   And you don't know how many times I'll just call people I know, whether it's like my friends like Damon John, Shark Tank. I'll be like, yo, what's really good with this?  This is what life is about, having those connections and that communication.   I won't say no rapper's name, but then I get a call from somebody else and they say, hey man, you know, they cancel the show. They took our 20,000 and 30,000. Do you know how to reach them? And I was able to go through somebody who was in their camp and got the money back. The promoter was never gonna get it back because they didn't have that connection.  If Kenny calls me up today and says, ice man, I need a favor such and such and such and such, if I can't handle a favor, I got somebody that owes me a favor that can handle that favor. So having the, there's nothing better than the network.  The favors are way more valuable than the money. Way more valuable. I learned that. Better relationships, way more better. And that's the hip hop attorney, ladies and gentlemen. Man. But one more nugget to the hip hop attorney. What? I love it. Say for example, we have our own social media, right? Thehiphopraternity.com. If Ice T give me a project, I can put that project on our social media and we can send out a mass text. We have the ability to sell, cause we collect digital real estate and I can send that message and that within itself is a benefit because now Ice T can sell 100,000 records if we have a million fans or a million members and then 100,000 will put them instantly on the billboard charts and that will instantly bring the program directors in and now we got a record that's trending. So you know, that's what a lot of companies do. Like give you the best example of that. Look at Live Nation. Live Nation, when you do a Live Nation concert, they email all those people in their database and guess what? Those concerts sell out in 30 seconds. Well, we're gonna have that same ability because we're gonna keep building this net. It's gonna get wider. Right now we have 4,000 going on 5,000 members. You know, we have thousands of members that's active right now on the website, on the social media and we also have our own clothing line. You see the jacket? I know. So he becomes a billboard.  We sold a thousand jackets that's walking around with hip hop fraternity. You know, we have our own award show, hip hop fraternity awards. You know, where we don't, like Icy said, we're independent. We ain't got the call. I mean, we love the Grammys. Give them another, give them another. But we don't have to worry about the Grammys. We'll have to worry about the BETV or MTV because guess what? We got our own award show. And guess what? You know, we got a lot of celebrities just like BET that comes to our award show. We had like 10 celebrities come last year and that comes back from where Icy taught me many, many years ago, those relationships and be able to connect with people. Icy can't do the favor. He might not be able to make it at a certain date, but he might be able to call somebody in Atlanta. I remember one time, I did something at KOD it was my birthday party. Icy couldn't make it, but he called his daughter. They said, make sure you go to the Kenny Ives birthday party and support them. You know what I'm saying? So, that's the hip hop fraternity. And then guess what?  It's gonna be money there. We're gonna hire a venture capital. I plan on going broke. I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you about it. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Icy. I'm on pitch. Icy probably donates that to the pitch. I don't know. So, so, so, but anyway, you know, I mean, it's a lot of rappers, man, you know that not gonna make it.  So we wanna have a cushion there for those buzzard sisters. You know what I'm saying? And they're like with the record labels, you know, Universal, Def Jam, Sony Music, Columbia Records, you know, we wanna be able to have leverage to the point where we got enough members that's in the hip hop community can say, hey, look here, Universal, chill. You know what I'm saying? Quick, giving these bad deals out.  You know, just how the Italians did. Same, same scenario. The key to this game though, really, I've figured it out is that, you know, social media is an illusion. You know, I got two million followers, but how many of those people are totally active that are really moving with me? And I always tell new artists, I say, all you need is a thousand fans.  You basically have an income now. You do that three times a year.  But the trick is solidifying the hip hop fraternity where the people actually are active and what the attorney chooses to do, they move with them. You know, and that's not happening on social media.  And, you know, if I put up something on my social media, you know, maybe 100 people, maybe 200 people, 300 people are active on there. But the rest of just numbers. And people have confused social media with actual followers. I heard somebody had 10 million followers and they put out a record and they couldn't sell 2,000 records. You know, so don't get confused with social media, but this is real in social media. This is people actively connecting, actually in a database, actually moving together. On one accord. On one accord. So it's way more powerful and stuff.  It's a chat room. They talking right now. But if I tweet something right now and you're not on Twitter, you'll never see it. Cause it shoots by on your timeline and it's gone. So the theory that 2 million people are seeing it, no, only the people that are actively looking at the phone at that moment and happen to see it on the timeline, unless you have people that check your page daily. You know, that's why I did daily game. But it's an illusion. It's not really, it's not real. It's not real. Like even if I follow Kenny Ivy on Instagram, I cannot tell you when I've actually went to his page. See what I'm saying? You don't go to their page. If something he posts comes by, but it's in a timeline, it's moving.  That timeline is moving like stashed. So how effective is it? Yeah, yeah. And it's also a thing where they're not opening it up. They control the algorithm, right? So whoever they open it up to at a given moment or time is who can see it. You buy advertisements so that you can push a narrative too. But that opens it up to other people that may not even be following you. So these are people who don't really care, but they view it and you see views on them. If this is done correctly, this is an infant stage. If this is done correctly, it'll be more powerful for what we're doing than social media. Because what you'll do is you'll have a group of people that are into a certain thing in conversation together, not haters, all pushing the same thing. That's powerful. Man, I just wanna say one thing. No, no, no, seriously, we are all, don't get it twisted.  For sure.  So I just wanna make sure that people, IC don't let you in this house, let you hip hop fraternity. Let me tell you something. I'm in IC house, man. I'm not an actor. Come out here. Listen. I didn't see him call. That's what I had never seen before. Don't get it twisted. If I had to preach, I'd preach up in here. And he won't make a closure in the market. Say it. Okay. Okay, James. James, what's going on, man? All right, so I'm about to launch the political action committee segment of the hip hop fraternity under that umbrella. And the reason I wanna do this is because collectively hip hop is not just black, it's not just white. Collectively hip hop is all demographics of people, all different genres.  You'd have white, black, Jew, Asian. You see what I'm saying? So in that database, we have way more numbers collectively of hip hop, you know, participants and people who love hip hop music. So under that banner, the hip hop political action committee, we would have a strong number of voting demographic. We could take that number and go to Congress and fight for anything that we need in hip hop. You know, like Ken said, when it comes to the pension, healthcare, all these things are essential, but guess what? We don't have the number base right now to fight for and to actively be accounted for on that level. So launching the political action committee is going to be able to identify with that demographic who stands with us as hip hop community and hip hop fraternity affiliates. So that's a power base that we're able to have tangible, physical, and that can actively, you know, work for us. Cause guess what? Every other situation, LGBT, Jews, Asians, they all collectively get their numbers together, come to Congress, come to the White House, and those numbers speak for itself. And they leverage that voting demographic, you know, to themselves and for their resources. So I think we have the potential to do the same thing. And when I voted to Ken- The new emancipation, new emancipation. Oh yeah, that's another thing. You know, the new emancipation proclamation is literally the power of unlocking the mind in order to access resources. A lot of us are still stuck in the slave mentality, got the chains on the brain and not able to really function. We're not getting the right information too. So that's another thing that leaves us stagnated now. We fall into the whole crabs in the bowel syndrome as well. That's a very stagnated low level vibration that's, you know, has possessed a lot of our people. So we have to break out of that. I'm always encouraging people surround yourself with people who are doing things actively. This is why our hip hop fraternity is another relief source as well. You know what I'm saying? I have two mental programs. You know, I teach about leadership and how important it is to align yourself properly. So people who are stagnated, you know, and that low level of operation, we're not with that. Hip hop fraternity is very progressive. We're making numbers and we're networking and we're expanding on a daily basis. You want to be down with the winning team, get down with us. Man, there it is. Votto, man. Hey, man. Votto James, man. Ken and Ice, man. Ice T, man. Thank you for inviting us. Boss Talk 101 over at Ice T House. Ken, man. Stop playing, man. We winning, man. Hey, J.L. Hey, J.L. Man, it's been another great segment.  You know what we say? It's always a treat. We play. Hey, man, hey, man, it's been another great segment. Boss Talk 101, what a boss is told. And we have.