The implementation of data governance sometimes bring up the familiar conundrum, “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Rephrasing the question, what comes first, data governance or data migration?
Well, simply in this case, in order to fully realise benefits of your data, data governance(the chicken, I know!) has to come first second to data!
Data is generated as soon as a business idea is born but it is often treated as a by-product (important) of the core business operations, services and objectives.
Undeniably, data is an integral part of all businesses, starting from a feasibility study right through to delivering the first result, data is required.
Now that I have briefly clarified and convinced you that data drives business, where then does data governance come in? From the very beginning!
To make decisions which will improve the business outcomes from the data generated, to reflect on past business performances and to identify areas where the business needs to focus on, there needs to be process(es) in place governing how data is collected, used and stored.
Most businesses, already have a form of data governance in place however, the processes are usually not actively and properly implemented, formalised or embedded enough to ensure common pitfalls such as accumulating data debt and having poor data quality do not occur.
When data governance is not properly implemented and a data migration is planned, it often makes it more difficult and costly to achieve the benefits which were anticipated when deciding to migrate to a new data storage platform.
Therefore, it is beneficial to have data governance in place prior to a data migration especially to provide guardrails, guidance and direction for the migration process.
Where data governance doesn’t already exist, a migration project is a good place to start implementing data governance across your enterprise.