One of the keys to running smooth operations in marketing is to implement practical data governance. You need to make sure that any data that you are publishing has some standards and rigger to ensure your team is delivering to the internal brand reputation. If you lose trust in the data then you start to have very critical issues within the company.

Step one is to implement the basics, where that if any data is published then you require the basic understanding of the source of data and the time period, and the author. If you put the owner of the data, and when the data was published, when it was updated and where it was sourced from.

Google analytics for example would give you different data to straight awstats logs of hits on website. And you will find depending on the source of data if it is sales from a crm, then salespeople might backdate their sales. So you want to know the period of the data and then when it was updated.

From here you can step into creating a data dictionary, everybody has their own definition of profit and opportunity for example, if you can state the contentious headings and the formula you will find this is gives the transperancy.

People loved how with excel you could click and see the formula. If you can provide that level of discovery in modern stacks like tableau or powerBi you will maintain the trust of the employees.

This is a complete ROI issue, where you need a committee to monitor the level of mistrust, and issues and decide how much the rule need to be enforced to decide the level of data governance.

The next important step in the maturity journey is to look at an approval system. Governance needs to be treated with a mix of training, policing and automation.

Where you can you want to publish your standards, then police what people are doing and then automate the approval. You might have a dashboard with sales and marketing data. You can establish data stewards that approve the dashboard and a ux of data and then a nice workflow for approval for a dashboard that will be company wide. If it is just for the sales department then it may just need one person to approve before publishing.

As with all governance it is about balance and growth and building something while managing your risks.