By Frank Dravis, Senior Consultant
I was working with a client collecting stakeholder inputs in preparation for a proposed data governance program. One of the questions I asked the interviewees was “How do you expect data governance to help you?” The responses varied by the person’s role in the organization, but universally, all of the managers, be they in field marketing, global marketing, sales ops, or other areas answered the question in roughly the same way: they expected data governance to improve data quality.
Yes, data governance will indeed improve data quality over time through the implementation of policies and better processes, but the respondents expected data governance to directly affect data cleansing operations.
Suffice it to say there is a whole chain of activities that need to take place between the formation of a data governance program and the point where a data analyst connects a data quality solution to the data and begins the standardizing and de-duping. However, it was encouraging for me to see the value proposition of the two concepts, governance and quality, inextricably intertwined, no attempts to separate or isolate them. Our client’s business people fervently believed that taken together data governance and data quality were the solution to the myriad of problems exacerbated by silo-ed, fractured, and unreliable data.
My guess is that this client’s adoption curve for data governance will be shorter and can piggy-back off the successes of data quality. I’ll let you know if I’m right.

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