Award Winner Spotlight: Brad Hill, Rising Star in Data Governance

Congratulations to Brad Hill, Data Enablement Analyst at Aware Super, who took home the Rising Star in Data Governance award at ADG Summit 2026. We caught up with Brad to hear more about his work, his advice for the next generation of governance practitioners, and where he sees the discipline heading.

What do you do? A brief description of what you do and your role.

Primarily, my role centres on Data Enablement, although like many areas of data and AI, it’s constantly evolving. My focus is on understanding how Data Governance can help the broader business improve in three key areas: Auditability, Continuity and Trust. Ultimately, it’s about helping people make better decisions with confidence while ensuring the right guardrails are in place.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone trying to make an impact in data or AI governance right now?

It might sound cliché, but clichés exist for a reason: be curious, keep an open mind, and invest time in understanding what the people around you do every day.

You’d be surprised how much governance, quality and risk management is already happening as a matter of course in engineering, reporting and data teams. Build the relationships that matter, listen to people’s stories, and understand the processes behind the data.

You don’t need to know everything, but you do need to know the people who do.

And always keep Goodhart’s Law in mind: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Looking ahead, what’s next for you, and where do you see data/AI governance heading?

For me, the next step is continuing to improve how we tell the stories behind our data and AI processes.

As governance practitioners, we need to anticipate the next wave of challenges and establish sensible guardrails before those challenges arrive. The good news is that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The foundational principles remain the same.

What is changing is our ability to harness the growing volume of metadata and operational information around us, turning it into meaningful insights and processes that make life easier for the people doing the work every day.