Carragee Consulting

Can you really outsource data governance?

One of the biggest luxuries in my life these days is once a month cleaners at my house. I could never have imagined paying someone to clean my house before, but I’ve been working a ton and have a toddler now and I decided to pay to know our toilets are cleaned our floors are scrubbed and surfaces get dusted.

The thing is, before they come we scurry around the house and pick up stray coffee cups, put dirty laundry into baskets and clear the dishes. I bring things back to the rooms I know they “belong” in and try to clear surfaces.

Its such a luxury to have someone do the deep cleaning, but we know where we want to store things and what is a treasured art project vs trash. This is very similar to hiring consultants or having specialized departments working on data quality.

You can have a dedicated data governance function and/or software, but they won’t be able to write your glossary on behalf of the subject matter experts in the business. You have someone manage the pipelines, but someone needs to know the refresh frequency and the logical association between sources.

So remember, you still have to clean and organize as part of your data quality initiative and just like doing the laundry and cleaning the kitchen, its not a once and done task.