A Data Governance Baseline You Can Build Before Any System

Governance is the least appealing item on any readiness list and the one that most often determines whether the others hold. It is also the cheapest to start, because the first version is a register rather than a system.

Four things make up a workable baseline. Ownership: every significant product-data field has a named person accountable for it, not a department. Currency: each has a last-reviewed date someone actually maintains. Traceability: when a value changes, there is a record of what it was and why. Access: it is deliberate who can change what.

Ownership is the one that changes things fastest. In most factories, ambiguous fields are ambiguous because everyone touches them and nobody owns them. Assigning a name does not require authority or budget — it requires a decision, and it converts a data quality argument into a conversation with a specific person.

Currency is where good intentions usually die, because review dates are easy to set and tedious to maintain. The fix is to attach the review to something that already happens — a season handover, a buyer submission, an internal audit — rather than to a calendar reminder nobody will honour. Routines that ride on existing events survive; standalone ones do not.

None of this needs a platform, and doing it first makes any later platform purchase considerably more likely to succeed. Software can enforce ownership and traceability, but it cannot decide them. Factories that buy first and govern later end up with a system that faithfully records nobody’s responsibility.