May 21, 2026

Data Governance for Energy Companies That Don't Have a Data Team

By John Wassilak

When most operators hear the phrase “data governance,” they picture something they’re pretty sure they don’t have the budget for. A committee. A framework. A consultant binder. Maybe a chief data officer somewhere down the line.

That’s not what we mean here.

A lot of the operators we work with don’t have a dedicated data team. They have a couple of analysts, an IT manager who covers a dozen things, somebody in accounting who has become the de facto Excel expert, and a vendor or two that handle specific systems. That’s the “data team,” and it’s already stretched.

Telling that organization to adopt a governance framework is asking the wrong thing. The right question is: what does governance actually have to do, at minimum, for the data to be trustworthy and for the business to keep running well?

The honest answer is shorter than most people expect. You don’t need a program. You need a few specific habits, a few named owners, and the discipline to keep them in place.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

What governance is actually trying to accomplish

Strip away the frameworks and the vocabulary, and data governance is trying to answer four questions consistently.

Whose call is it when this data is wrong?
What are the rules for what “right” looks like?
How do we know the rules are being followed?
What changes when the rules need to change?

If your organization can answer those four questions for the data that runs the business, you have governance. You may not have a governance program, but you have the thing the program is supposed to produce.

A lot of mid-size operators have informal answers to these questions. The accounting manager is the de facto owner of the working interest register. Production volumes get reconciled a certain way because that’s how Sue does it. The well master gets cleaned up when somebody notices a problem. None of it is written down, but it works.

The problem is that informal governance breaks the moment any of the people involved leave, change roles, or get overloaded. When Sue retires, the production reconciliation methodology retires with her. Nobody can answer question two anymore, and questions one through four start cascading.

The minimum viable governance is what you need to make sure that doesn’t happen.

What “minimum viable” actually means

For an operator without a dedicated data team, minimum viable governance comes down to a small number of artifacts and a small number of habits.

A list of the data domains that matter. Not a comprehensive inventory. The handful of data domains that the business actually depends on. For most upstream operators, that’s roughly: well master, production, land and ownership, financials, and regulatory filings. That’s the list. Five lines on a page is enough.

A named owner for each domain. One person, with the authority to make decisions when the data disagrees. Not a committee. Not “the team.” A name. The owner doesn’t have to be technical. They have to be willing to make the call when the well master and the land system disagree about who operates a property.

A short document for each domain that captures the rules. What’s the source of truth. How is “correct” defined for the trickier cases. What’s the cadence for updates. Where does the data live. Who needs to know when it changes. These documents do not need to be long. A page each is plenty. The point isn’t completeness. The point is that the rules exist somewhere other than a particular person’s head.

A defined process for changes. When the rules need to change (and they will), there has to be a way to make the change deliberately. Who has to agree. How does it get communicated. How is the historical record preserved when the rule changes mid-stream. This is the part most informal setups miss, and it’s the part that causes the most expensive disagreements later.

A way to spot problems. Not a fancy monitoring system. A handful of checks that surface the obvious issues. Wells with no operator. Working interests that don’t add up. Production volumes outside expected ranges. These can run as scheduled queries, as part of a monthly close checklist, or as a recurring agenda item in an existing meeting. The mechanism matters less than the fact that it exists.

That’s it. That’s the floor. Five things. None of them require a team you don’t have.

Why most governance attempts fail at this size

We’ve watched smaller operators try to do governance and fail in fairly predictable ways.

They adopted a framework that was too big. Pulling DAMA-DMBOK or a similar framework off the shelf and trying to implement it as written is going to overwhelm a five-person IT shop in week one. Frameworks are useful as reference material. They are not useful as project plans.

They tried to start with policy. Long policy documents that nobody reads, with rules nobody enforces, do not produce governance. They produce the appearance of governance. Start with operating habits. Codify them later if it helps. Don’t go in the other direction.

They made it everyone’s job. When governance is everyone’s responsibility it becomes nobody’s responsibility. The named owner pattern matters. One person, accountable, with the authority to decide.

They tried to govern data the business wasn’t using. Spending months defining quality standards for a data domain that isn’t actually feeding any decisions is a waste of time. Govern the data that the business depends on. Leave the rest until somebody has a reason to care.

They confused tooling for governance. Buying a data catalog doesn’t give you governance. It gives you a place to put governance metadata, if you have any. Most operators at this size do not need a catalog. They need ownership, rules, and a process.

Where to start

If you’re an operator without a data team and you’ve decided that the current state is no longer acceptable, here’s the order of operations.

Make the list. Sit down for an hour with whoever runs operations, accounting, and IT. Write down the data domains the business actually uses. Don’t argue about it. The first draft is fine.

Name the owners. Same meeting, ideally. Each domain gets one name. If two domains naturally have the same owner, that’s fine. If a domain doesn’t have an obvious owner, that’s a finding. Either appoint one, or note that the domain is unowned and treat that as a problem to solve.

Pick the highest-pain domain to govern first. Don’t try to do all of them. Pick the one that’s costing the most analyst time, missing deadlines, or producing reports the business doesn’t trust. Start there.

Write the page. Source of truth. Rules. Cadence. Who to call. One page. Get the owner to sign off on it. Share it with the people who touch the data.

Add the simplest possible monitoring. A monthly check that flags the obvious problems. A quarterly review of the rules to see whether they still match reality. A standing agenda item somewhere existing.

Repeat for the next domain when you have capacity. Do not try to do all of them at once. Governance built incrementally tends to stick. Governance built as a big initiative tends to die.

This is the same incremental philosophy we wrote about in From Spreadsheets to a Real Data Stack: A Realistic Migration Path for Mid-Size Operators. You don’t need to solve everything to get value from solving something.

What governance gets you, even at this scale

The temptation, at a smaller operator, is to think governance is a big-company problem. Worth doing eventually, when there’s time and budget, but not urgent.

That isn’t quite right. Smaller operators feel the pain of weak governance more than larger ones, because they have fewer people to absorb the cost when something breaks.

When the production reconciliation methodology lives entirely in one analyst’s head, that operator is one resignation away from a serious operational problem. When the well master gets updated by whoever happens to notice an issue, the inconsistencies pile up faster than anyone is fixing them. When there’s no documented source of truth for working interests, every disagreement turns into a meeting.

The cost of weak governance shows up as analyst time spent on reconciliation, missed deadlines on regulatory filings, slow responses to diligence requests, and decisions made on numbers that nobody quite trusts. We covered some of those failure modes in Data Quality in Upstream Oil and Gas: What Goes Wrong and Where to Start, and they are mostly governance failures dressed up as quality failures. The technical work to fix data quality almost always has to be supported by ownership, rules, and process. Otherwise the data goes back to being broken three months later.

Governance also makes everything else cheaper. The PPDM implementations that succeed tend to have governance underneath them, even informal governance. The ones that fail almost always have a governance gap somewhere. We wrote about this in Why Your PPDM Implementation Failed (and How to Try Again). The technical failures and the governance failures are usually the same failure.

What this looks like a year in

Operators who actually do this don’t end up with a governance program. They end up with a small body of habits and a small set of documents that quietly make the business run better.

The well master has an owner. The production reconciliation has a documented methodology. The land and ownership records have a clear source of truth, and when they disagree with another system there’s a defined way to resolve it. The monthly close gets done in less time, with fewer surprises. New employees can be onboarded without spending three months absorbing tribal knowledge.

None of that requires a data team. It requires a handful of people willing to be deliberate about a small number of things. The companies that do it well tend to look at their counterparts who have not, and notice that the gap keeps widening over time.

If your organization has been putting off governance because it sounded like a big-company problem, this is the version that probably actually fits. Five things. Five names. Five pages. The discipline to keep them current.

That’s the floor. It’s also enough.

We Were Just at PPDM 2026

We spent April 27 through 29 at the PPDM Energy Data Convention in Houston. A lot of the conversations at the booth came back to this exact topic, often phrased as “we know we should be doing governance but we don’t know where to start.” If that sounds familiar, we’d love to hear what you’re working on.