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• Appreciate that frequent and open communication is important. Often companies will hide
information out of fear of employee reactions in the mistaken idea that what people don’t know
won’t hurt them, and change will then be easier to accomplish. All this is does is create ungodly
rumors and organizational churn.
• Appreciate that there is a psychology to change. Understanding how people react is essential to
structuring your DG initiative to deal with it.
• Be absolutely clear and specific about what is changing and what that will mean in terms of required
behavior changes. People cannot change behavior if they don’t know what they’re supposed to
change.
• Don’t forget to realign those performance objectives and accountabilities. Change won’t happen
unless people are held accountable for required behavior changes.

Monitoring the adoption of the changes is a significant activity during your OCM plan execution.
Consider starting even before the rollout to make sure that the appropriate levels of communication
and training have occurred, and that those impacted feel as ready to go forward as they can at this
point. It is very normal to find issues as a result of this analysis; prioritize them and put action plans
together to address those essential to moving forward. Continue your assessments at regular intervals
(consider 30, 60, 90, and even 120 days after rollout), and address the issues you find. You should see
a steady increase in adoption and be able to determine when continued follow-up is no longer
required.

Sample Output

We have placed a template for pre- and post-rollout surveys in the appendices.

Tips for Success
At this point, you may be wondering why so much time has been spent on dealing with the organi-
zation’s likely reactions to the changes data governance will bring. Frankly, you can deal splendidly
with all the situational aspects of rolling out a DG program, but if you don’t deal with that dreaded
word emotion and have an equally splendid OCM plan to go with it, you won’t have much of a program
to roll out. Why? Because you will have been sabotaged at every turn by those who do not see the need
for it or who are threatened by it. So spend the time and the resources to deploy a strong OCM program
in support of data governance. You will have a much happier outcome.

Activity: DG Project Management

This activity is performed for each effort that is being governed. During the first few months after the
DG program goes “live,” this activity serves to make sure that DG projects are managed, sustaining
activities take place, education and training occur on schedule, and issues are dealt with. As time goes
on, this activity will monitor the functions of DG. Remember, while there will be startup consider-
ations, the sustaining phase is permanent.
Given that there is a large amount of basic material on program management available from many
sources, this activity section will focus only on DG-specific activity and tasks.