By Michael Stiffler, Strategic Consultant, Data Governance, Harte-HanksTrillium Software
One activity that may help create a credible and successful Data Governance program – and achieve early executive buy-in – is embedding Data Governance policies and processes into your corporate infrastructure. This allows for seamless integration of Data Governance into existing processes your company is already relying on.
An example of where you can do this is in your software/system development life cycle (SDLC). Now, of course, if you don’t take this approach, violations of these data governance policies will be seen downstream after the project's completion (ideally earlier if you have robust test and development cycles). But to keep rework to a minimum, be proactive about Data Governance and embed your DG processes into the development lifecycle in the planning stages and through the formal project management organization.
Gathering business metadata, documentation, approvals, accountable parties, and data owners is usually much easier when you incorporate these elements up front, than after the completion of the project. That makes sense, right?
And creating new processes for data quality mitigation or establishing escalation processes is less efficient when it needs to done as a fire drill on the back end.
Additionally, Data Governance will be a part of the project timeline and you won't have to reset expectations or risk losing resources (e.g., subject matter experts) that are not already allocated and approved for the Data Governance effort.
Among other things, Data Governance should help bridge the gap between IT and the business. As part of this partnership, these two organizations would have already agreed to follow a standard process for application/system/database development (from collecting requirements to production release), so Data Governance policies will fit right in.
Piggy-backing off existing lifecycle project agreements and embedding Data Governance processes into your SDLC is a logical extension and should make enforcement of Data Governance policies a little easier.
Have you done this before? How did it work out for you?



