Data Governance Blog

Governing Prime Data

Recently someone asked me, “What is Prime Data and how does it relate to data governance?”  It is a good question because many people struggle with deciding what data needs to be governed and Prime Data helps reign in the scope of governance efforts. Actually, the term first started out as key data suggested a former co-worker. That was a hard-sell for me due to the fact the word key has such specific meaning in data circles.

I preferred and still prefer prime, or primary data. This is data that is almost ubiquitously used at the organization such as customer data, product data, or account data. If you apply the 80/20 rule, then 80% of your systems have this data, and it represents less than 20% of all of your data. It includes most of the Master Data plus the other commonly used fields needed for both operations and analysis. Read more »