This week, let's look at an infamous example of the failure of governance -- the Volkswagen "pollution test firmware hack" that made the news in 2015.

As of this writing, at least four nations are pursuing criminal investigations of various people and organizational units within Volkswagen, to see just how many legal and regulatory constraints were side-stepped, ignored, or flat-out violated as the company tried to improve its overall fleet air quality and fuel economy standards.

Your task: determine whether this unfortunate chain of events was caused, aided and abetted by a lack of governance mechanisms, or whether those mechanisms and policies were in place but somehow systematically avoided, evaded, neutralized, or otherwise disregarded by the people responsible.

Present your thesis, findings and conclusions in a properly-formatted APA style paper, with title page, references, etc. While no set maximum length on the body of the paper is established, if you're going much beyond 8 pages (or far less than 2), you may wish to seriously re-examine your work to see if it's addressing the issues and the data effectively.

You'll need to research this incident, both to get a good sense of background and have some specific data to support your arguments and conclusions with. Since whole situation is still an ongoing set of investigations in many places, the published data, evidence and analyses are at best "preliminary." But there should be more than enough "out there" for you to get a good look into this situation and with which you can formulate some opinions.

The following general questions about information governance may help you in framing your research, analysis, and organization of your findings:

1. What is the purpose and scope of data governance? How does this compare and contrast with the purposes of information quality assurance, or software quality assurance?

2. It is said that data or information governance helps play a role in business process management, in process re-engineering and in continuous quality improvement. Explain how this works, in general terms.

3. What role should information governance considerations play when determining the organization's information security and assurance needs? How should these consider the needs to assure correct, timely, properly-informed decision making (and the correct implementation of those decisions)?

4. Considering your answers to the preceding questions, what conflicts do you see between these various processes? Does one of them seem to be a more natural leader for the others, for example? Or are they all supposed to be working somehow in harmony without any one in the driver's seat? Explain how you see these kinds of issues being worked out, using an example (real or hypothetical) to illustrate.