Governance wasn’t in the room

I watched a multimillion-dollar data warehouse get built without a single governance conversation.

Not because the team didn't know better. Because governance had a reputation problem. It was considered boring work. The unsexy work. The work you do after the real work is done.

So when the cloud modernization initiative kicked off at a large health institution I supported, the focus went to architecture, infrastructure, and timeline. Governance didn't make the agenda.

The warehouse shipped. It was technically sound. And then the calls started coming.

Business unit after business unit had a version of the truth that didn't match what was in the warehouse. Finance had their numbers. Operations had theirs. Clinical had theirs. None of them matched. And every single one of them was convinced theirs was right. The technology team took the blame. For months.

The problem was never technical. The data was moving correctly. The pipelines worked. The warehouse did exactly what it was designed to do.

What was missing was a single agreed definition of what the numbers were supposed to mean. Who owned them. Who had the authority to resolve conflicts. What happened when two versions of the truth showed up in the same boardroom.

That's a governance problem. And governance had been left out of the room.

I learned something from that experience that my doctoral research later confirmed: the organizations that treat governance as an afterthought always pay for it. They just pay later, at a higher cost, and with someone else holding the bill.