Nicola Askham

From what I have seen over the years, it is common to get your first Data Governance experience in an organisation that you currently work for. However, the downside is that company knows that you have only done Data Governance for them. Once you have 18 months/2 years experience of Data Governance, it is best to then move to another company/organisation. You are then coming in as the Data Governance expert and are in a better position to become/be considered a Data Governance leader.

Community Forums are so valuable when you are learning Data Governance, I have always found DG professionals very helpful and supportive to each other. This group is a free Data Governance Networking Group: https://www.linkedin.com/company/53400044/admin/feed/posts/

Do some research before using GenAI tools to learn about. There is a lot of incorrect information about Data Governance on the internet and ChatGPT and other similar tools do not know which is right and which is wrong. If you want to use such tools make sure that you understand the basic concepts first (especially which things are NOT Data Governance like Data Security and Data Protection).

In my experience, multinational organisations are likely to have different needs in different regions or countries. For this reason, it is important to design a Data Governance Framework that has some overarching high-level principles that can be adapted as needed in different regions. So undertaking an audit to understand if different data is held or needed in different parts of the company can be a valuable activity

Executive sponsorship is critical for successful Data Governance but the only way to get that is to talk about the value that Data Governance is going to bring. So, don't bore them with lots of details of what Data Governance is, explain why your organisation needs to do Data Governance, what value it will bring and how DG will help your organisation achieve it's corporate strategy and objectives.

I think it important in this circumstance to not try to boil the ocean. You are not going to be able to do Data Governance over everything at once so choose one area to focus on first. Maybe a data domain or maybe you have a programme to replace a significant system, in which case you could choose to implement Data Governance over just the new system initially. Keeping your scope smaller enables you to focus on delivering value in that one area. If you can do Data Governance over just one domain/system/business area successfully you can then add another phase over another domain/system/business area.