Ownership Before Governance

A 20-page data governance policy with no named owners is a document nobody can enforce.

I keep finding the same sequence. Trust in the numbers drops and someone senior asks for governance. A policy gets written: classification levels, a quality standard, an approval flow. Sometimes a catalog gets bought to hold it all.

Then the policy needs someone to apply it to an actual table, and the answer is “the data team”. A handful of people, covering hundreds of tables they didn’t create.

The order that works for me starts smaller. I take the 10 tables reporting reads most and ask each producing team to name one owner. Those owners write the first rules for their own tables, because they know where the data breaks.

A check you can run today: count the pages in your governance doc, then count the named owners. If the first number is bigger, start on the second.

I wrote up how I’d build governance without the bureaucracy here: https://thomasnys.com/data-governance-framework/