The data quality journey starts with a single step

Building up a data governance program to maintain data quality and ensure that corporate information is both reliable and usable can seem like a major undertaking.

Writing for the SAP blog, Michael Brenner lists a few of the steps that can get the idea for an information governance initiative up and running. The first move involves setting a definition for what data governance will entail for each division of the company. As Brenner points out, the IT department may be more concerned with data management, while those on the business side will want to know how they will receive the data.

To prevent people from becoming overwhelmed with the task, he advises explicitly stating what you hope to accomplish and how much of the data you are tackling at one time. Choose a business problem that you want to solve and start from there, set a deadline for when it should be accomplished and define how the data will look when you are done.

There will almost certainly be some roadblocks in your effort to introduce a governance plan in the enterprise. Making it clear that data quality is everyone's responsibility and getting executives involved from the outset will make it possible to avoid the delays and confusion that can result in program failures.