This week we’re highlighting Winfried Adalbert Etzel, Senior Specialist for Data Management at Equinor, DAMA-registered educator, and author of the upcoming book Data Governance in the Wild.
Bringing an unconventional background in history, political science, and law to the tech world, Winfried applies source criticism and institutional design to modern data challenges. He translates strategic intent into operational reality, helping organizations move beyond bureaucracy toward true accountability. In this interview, Winfried explains why the current “wild” state of data is a prime opportunity for rethinking and why the best data professionals are often negotiators rather than just coders.
Hyperight.com: What’s the best way to describe your job to someone outside tech?
Winfried Adalbert Etzel: I help Equinor and my students to take responsibility for their data. Most companies collect enormous amounts of information, but few have figured out who is accountable for it, who decides what it means, or what happens when things go wrong. I help them build that clarity. Not through more bureaucracy, but through better coordination between people, processes, and technology.
Hyperight.com: What originally sparked your interest in AI/data, and what keeps you inspired today?
Winfried Adalbert Etzel: History, oddly enough. If you study history, you learn source criticism. You learn how to evaluate a text written by someone, for a certain purpose, at a certain point in time. We are doing exactly the same with data and AI now. Why was that model trained? On what dataset? What was the context?
What keeps me inspired is that the field is still wild. We have not solved data governance. The assumptions we built it on have collapsed. That means everything is up for rethinking. That is exciting, not discouraging.
Hyperight.com: What is one challenge you’re trying to solve, and why does it matter?
Winfried Adalbert Etzel: How to make accountability work in distributed environments without centralizing control. The old model of a central governance team dictating rules does not scale. But pure domain autonomy fragments accountability until nobody owns anything. The challenge is balancing autonomy and alignment. It matters because when accountability fragments, trust fragments.
Hyperight.com: A tool you can’t live without (tech or not)?
Winfried Adalbert Etzel: Anthropic’s Claude. For all its worth, from ideation to rethinking. From planning to organizing.
Hyperight.com: What trend in data or AI do you think will shape the Nordic region the most?
Winfried Adalbert Etzel: Accountability. The Nordics have a strong tradition of public trust in institutions. AI and data without accountability erodes that trust fast. And the critical insight is that AI governance is not a separate discipline. We were already moving towards distributed landscapes and computational governance before 2022. AI accelerated the same development. If we treat it as something apart, we just create another blind spot.
Hyperight.com: What’s one piece of advice you’d give to others entering the data and AI field?
Winfried Adalbert Etzel: Stop reaching for blueprints. Blueprint data governance does not exist. And remember: the problems are rarely technical. They are about meaning, ownership, and coordination. The best data professionals can sit in a room with a business leader and a data engineer and translate between them. That skill is negotiation, not coding.
