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Most data governance failures are not caused by poor frameworks, immature tooling, or lack of policy. They are caused by behaviour.
In this session, Andy Bradley explores why governance intensity diminishes as delivery pressure increases, how ambiguity around ownership creates behavioural shortcuts, and why governance is treated as optional when incentives reward speed over stewardship.
Using the idea of “desire paths” as a metaphor for visible workarounds, the talk reframes governance as a system design issue. If behaviour fills the space that structure leaves behind, then governance must be embedded into decision points, trade-off clarity, and executive measures of success.
The session also examines how AI exposes structural weaknesses in governance through speed, abstraction, autonomy and optionality.
Attendees will leave with specific structural changes that make governance durable under delivery pressure, including introducing data debt, clarifying where governance decisions should happen, and making non-compliance visible without making it punitive.
Andy Bradley is Head of Strategy and Adoption at Telefónica Tech, working at the intersection of data governance, operating models and organisational change.
He specialises in helping organisations move from governance frameworks that exist on paper to governance practices that function under real delivery pressure. His work focuses on ownership clarity, behavioural incentives, and embedding governance into delivery rhythms rather than positioning it as a parallel control function.
Andy has led governance and data transformation initiatives across large public and private sector organisations and speaks regularly on governance, AI adoption and structural behaviour in digital programmes.
