Data Governance Is Not About Governance

You’ve just been made responsible for improving data governance in your organisation. So you do what any sensible person would do. You research frameworks, create policies, and build a RACI. You even establish a Data Steering committee.

Six months later, the framework exists, the policies are published, and the steering committee meets monthly.

BUT, nobody’s behaviour has changed.

This is what many organisations get wrong about governance. They treat it as a design problem when it’s actually a organisational change opportunity.

The framework is never the hard part. Getting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of colleagues to change how they work with data every day is the hard part.

The organisations I’ve seen get this right do three things differently.

1. They start by listening, not legislating. They find out where the real pain is before writing a single policy.
2. They make governance feel like help, not oversight. If the first thing people hear about governance is “you’re doing it wrong,” you’ve already lost them.
3. They invest as much in communication and training as they do in tooling and processes.

Data governance IS organisational change. If you’re not running it like a change programme, you’re just building a library of documents nobody reads.

What’s been your experience? Has data governance ever landed well without a deliberate focus on bringing people along?