Data migration projects have a well-deserved reputation for running over budget and past deadline. While technical complexity plays a role, many migration failures trace back to governance gaps—unclear ownership, missing documentation, unresolved data quality issues, and decisions that can't get made because no one has authority to make them.
Governance as Risk Mitigation
Effective data governance doesn't slow migration projects down—it prevents the delays that occur when governance is absent. Consider the contrast:
- Without governance: The project team needs to understand customer data. No one can definitively explain what certain fields mean, why some values exist, or how the data relates to other systems. Weeks pass while the team interviews stakeholders, reviews conflicting documentation, and makes educated guesses.
- With governance: The data steward for customer data provides current documentation, explains business rules, and answers questions authoritatively. Analysis that would take weeks completes in days.
This pattern repeats across every migration activity: mapping, transformation design, validation rules, reconciliation, cutover planning. Governance provides the information and decision authority that keeps work moving.
Key Governance Contributions
Clear Data Ownership
Migration projects constantly require decisions: How should conflicting values be resolved? What data should be migrated versus archived? How clean does the data need to be? Without designated owners, these decisions escalate, linger, and block progress.
Data stewards—business people accountable for specific data domains—provide the authority to make these decisions. They understand the business context, can assess trade-offs, and can commit their organizations to specific approaches.
Documented Data Definitions
Migration mapping requires understanding what source data means and how it corresponds to target structures. When business glossaries and data dictionaries exist, this understanding is readily available. When they don't, the migration team must reconstruct this knowledge, often incompletely.
Good documentation includes not just field definitions but business rules, valid values, relationships between entities, and known data quality issues. Migration teams consume this documentation voraciously.
Data Quality Visibility
Migration exposes data quality issues that may have been invisible or tolerated in legacy systems. Organizations with mature governance typically have quality metrics, known issue inventories, and established processes for addressing problems.
This visibility helps migration teams plan realistically. Rather than discovering quality issues during testing, they can account for data cleansing in project plans and set appropriate stakeholder expectations.
Change Management Processes
Migration changes how data flows through the organization. Governance provides frameworks for assessing impact, notifying affected parties, and coordinating transitions. Without these frameworks, migration teams must improvise change management while simultaneously executing complex technical work.
Building Governance for Migration
Organizations with weak governance often attempt to build it during migration projects. While this is challenging, it's better than ignoring governance entirely. Key focus areas:
Identify Data Stewards
For each major data domain in scope, identify someone who can make authoritative decisions. This person needs business knowledge, organizational credibility, and time allocated to the project.
Document As You Go
Migration analysis generates documentation as a byproduct. Capture this knowledge in forms that will outlive the project—data dictionaries, business glossaries, data flow diagrams.
Establish Decision Processes
Define how data-related decisions will be made during the project. Who can make which types of decisions? How are disagreements resolved? What requires executive escalation?
Create Quality Baselines
Measure data quality before migration begins. This establishes baselines for comparison, identifies issues requiring attention, and provides evidence for scope discussions.
Governance Enables Migration Success
Migration projects that succeed on time and budget typically share common characteristics: they knew what data they were dealing with, they could get decisions made quickly, and they had clear ownership of data domains. These characteristics don't happen by accident—they're the products of data governance.
Organizations planning major migrations should assess their governance maturity honestly. If governance is weak, the choice isn't whether to address it but when—before the project begins, during the project under pressure, or after go-live when problems surface in production.
Governance isn't overhead on migration projects—it's infrastructure. Invest in it before migration begins, and the project runs smoother. Neglect it, and you'll build it anyway, just under worse conditions.