Governance Metrics That Matter

Governance Metrics That Matter

Coverage, time-to-find, time-to-trust, incident MTTR — measure adoption, not policy.

Why it matters

Counting written policies is theatre. Counting time-to-trust (how long to validate a new dataset is safe to use) drives real behaviour change.

Going deeper

Shift your dashboard from Activity Metrics to Outcome Metrics:

Bad Metric (Theatre)	Good Metric (Reality)	Why it matters
Number of data stewards appointed	% of P1 data incidents acknowledged by a steward < 1h	Measures actual accountability
Number of tables placed in catalogue	% of top 100 queries reading from certified catalogue tables	Measures consumer trust
Number of data quality rules	Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) a data drop before users report it	Measures if rules actually trap bugs

If your metrics are consistently green but your data users are still complaining, you are measuring the wrong thing.

Governance metrics are like gym memberships vs actual gym attendance.

Selling 500 memberships (writing 5 policies and holding 10 meetings) tells you nothing about fitness. Actual fitness is measured by active attendance: 'how many people showed up to lift weights this week?'

In data governance, a 'vanity metric' is '12 data domains defined'. A 'fitness metric' is 'mean time for a new analyst to find and successfully query the golden customer record is under 2 hours.' You only improve what you measure in reality, not on paper.