Data Governance succeeds in practice, not in presentations. Stop PowerPointing. Start smart experiments and pilots. Actually govern something. Rest assured: You'll figure out the rest.
There's a special corner of corporate hell reserved for 400-slide decks on data governance—dense with frameworks, maturity models, and color-coded hierarchies of accountability. These decks are polished. They are sophisticated. And they are utterly useless.
Because none of it makes data usable.
That's the point of governance. Not compliance theatre. Not process for process's sake. Not another acronym to print on the org chart. Governance means making data usable—discoverable, trustworthy, secure, and relevant. The problem is, most companies try to govern data before they even know what data they have or how it should serve their goals. It's like designing traffic laws for a city that hasn't poured a single road.
Want to know how to make your data usable? Build a product, like a dashboard or forecast. Notice what's broken. Ask why three teams define "active user" or "product color" in five different ways. Then fix it and define future responsibilities along the way. That's effective governance: not abstract, but deeply operational.
And yet, over and over, executives are sold on "starting with strategy." And to be clear: Of course you need a map before the journey! But don't mistake drafting the perfect atlas for actually leaving your driveway. It may feel safe and smart, but it’s actually stalling your progress—a perfect example of opportunity cost in action, choosing PowerPoint evolution over actual progress.
The teams that succeed start with a clear initial plan, solve real problems, and relentlessly refine as they go. They publish a shared glossary. They agree on some metrics. They log a dataset, clean it up, and make it searchable. Then they do it again. It's boring. It's gritty. And it works. This incremental approach creates positive externalities across the organization, compounding like interest over time.
Data governance is like a gym membership. The value comes from doing the work. You can't deck your way to strong muscles. You have to lift. If your team hasn't made a single dataset better this month, you don't have a governance program. You have a PowerPoint problem.
You want a four-word strategy? Here it is: Ship. Learn. Fix. Repeat.
No thick slide decks required.