Building Trust in Data with Data Governance

Data governance initiatives are based on people because it’s a change management process. And just like many other projects, you can buy any tool, but the tool will only do what you tell it to do. Once you focus on the human and understand that people are reluctant to change, that they need to understand the value, that they need to be informed, and that they need communication. Once you have that down, then you are far more likely to succeed in your data governance initiative.

The data governance application landscape has evolved tremendously in the past years. What we saw a couple of years back was big players having one platform doing everything–etl, quality storage, data warehouse, etc. Now, we see more and more specialized players, but that are still too focused on the technical side–data sources, data transformation ETLs, data visualization, co parsing, etc. There are plenty of players now, but very little business focus to determine how they can serve the business part of the organization and their value-add. I think this technically-focused approach is detrimental, and we really need to focus on the business value of these tools.