Think you’d have to be Nostradamus to do that? Keep reading for 3 ways to be proactive in enfocing data governance policies.


1. SDLC
Does your company have a PMO? Do they have a standard way of initiating a project? If so, you absolutely must inject your program into this. A best practice we have found is to add some key questions to the project initiation questionaire that triggers an email to us if they are answered in a way that requires the Data Governance Office to take a look. Obviously not every organization will have an online project initiation questionairre, but if you do – this is a highly effective way to be notified of any projects that plan to use data fields in a new way, create new fields, or make changes that the DGO should be aware of.

2. Data Modelers
This is a sneaky yet effective way to catch changes. For database changes, the data modelers must always be involved. If a change has gotten past you through injecting your program into the SDLC, the data modelers can be very effective allies who can tip you off of proposed changes. I’ve written before about how the data modelers can help you, and this is yet another reason that you should be working closely with them. Its also important to ensure that they understand and have bought into the data governance program.


3. Turn everyone into a Sleuth
This stems back to the fact that you should announce your program when it is initiated and get some internal publicity and visibilty. Using this visibility, include some statements and quotes that give the idea that data misuse should be sent on to the DGO for review.

There you have it.  These aren’t necessarily groundbreaking, but if you put them in place you’ll have a better overall governance program that is both proactive and reactive.

I thought about this for a while. I’m so used to a large corporation where there are lots of tools and resources available (although they aren’t waiting for you to ask them to do something) so I had to think about this one for a bit…. What would I do if I was in his situation?


I thought back about when I first started the Data Governance program at my company. We didn’t have a ton of support, a ton of staff, or any of the tools best suited for Data Governance… but, I found a way to use what we had to at least launch the campaign. Bonnie O’neil’s rule of “Use what you have lying around” certainly comes into play.

So, in this case, if the scope was already determined, I’d track everything in the best tool I had at the moment. If that means MS Excel or Access, that is what I’d use. You can always switch to something later if the funds become available, but you don’t want to just choose not to track, record, and document just because you don’t have the best tools out there.

If you show a high success rate very early on with almost no overhead, you will certainly get noticed and you’ll have experiences that many in the Data Governance area do not have because they’ve always had the fancy tools. You’ll have solid ‘in the weeds’ experience on how to build a Data Governance Program from the ground up.

Additionally, you may want to have a comment field for discussions that took place around this data field (not part of the metadata description, but in a separate area) and you’ll definitely want to have a place where you can indicate where the field currently is on your data maturity model.

One thing that we didn’t do, which I now regret, is to have a ‘date last reviewed’ area for a data element. This would certainly help as I’d quickly know when this particular field last came before the council. Since I don’t have this, I have to rely on a combination of memory and a review of my meeting minutes, notes, and website to find that date.