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Lou Holz asked, “What’s important now?” Asking this question is essential for data governance and MDM success.

A long time ago, I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a motivational talk from the great Lou Holtz, one of the greatest football coaches of all time. (“American Football”, for those of you across the pond.) He’s also well known for his colorful bon mots, which he honed convincing a group of kids to move the ball down field.

In the talk he gave us (a group of software developers who hadn’t touched a football since we were ten), one point he made over and over stood out. He asked us to ask ourselves this simple question: “What’s Important Now?”

It turns out this question is central to Lou’s whole philosophy; part of what makes him a great coach and motivational speaker. But I actually think “What’s Important Now?” is a great way to view your organization’s approach to data governance.

This is hardly a new concept. Different people have expressed it in different ways, such as “Lightweight Data Governance”, “Agile Data Governance” or “Proactive Data Governance”, to state a few examples. But taken together, these examples get to a central governance issue, one that more often than not distinguishes success from failure.

“Governance” is a social and political problem, more than a technology problem. So, in order to meet the social and political dimensions of data governance, your technology and IT strategy must be accompanied by a parallel business and political strategy.

Simply put, “better mousetraps” in the arena of data governance don’t ensure success. This may sound odd coming from a Master Data Management software vendor. But, in customer after customer, we’ve found that only those that understand the policy goals of their business, and the relevancy of MDM to those goals, are successful over time.

What does such a strategy look like? From Initiate’s perspective, a data governance strategy succeeds by focusing on “What’s Important Now”. I suggest an approach based on these three core principles:

1. Win Early: Identify a critical problem, and solve it first. This problem should be apparently painful to the organization, definitely cost money and can be quantified in some way that’s reportable to executive sponsors and stakeholders.
2. Credibility Matters: Leverage political capital from your early ROI to expand scope of your initiative. The momentum you establish from initial successes will help you tackle the tougher problems down the road.
3. Walk, Don’t Run: Define a roadmap for comprehensive governance over time. Document “lessons learned” from each expansion into a formal set of agreed policies that inform the next phase.

In the next few weeks, I’ll talk more specifically about each of these principles, citing experiences from Initiate’s customers that illustrate how they work in practice, in the real world of Enterprise MDM.

Until then, keep asking yourself, “What’s Important Now?”

(You can read about Lou at the College Football Hall of Fame.)

This post is part of a series, Data Governance: "What's Important Now?"