In the first century, Greek professor Heron of Alexandria created a coin-operated machine to dispense holy water. Back then, visitors to the city temples took more holy water than they paid for. His vending machine applied levers and countermeasures to give people only what they had permission to get. This arguably was the introduction to self-service governance.

Since then, many industries have grown self-service models—often focused on enabling nontechnical users, including information technology and data analytics. The popularity of self-service analytics has exposed a need for better data and access security. As you open up sensitive information like customer personally identifiable information (PII) for self-service research and BI projects, you need to make governance easy to implement in order to prevent misuse or breaches of that data. As most of us aren't Greek professors, I'm sharing four steps to ensure your journey toward self-service governance is successful.