Field governance
Field governance is the control over what fields exist, who may write to each, whether values are constrained, and what depends on them downstream.
CRM instances accumulate fields the way attics accumulate boxes. Each was added for a reason that made sense, none is ever removed, and after a few years a required-field list exists that no current employee can justify. The cost is not storage; it is that sellers satisfy required fields with whatever passes validation, which corrupts the data that governance was supposed to protect.
Governance means a field has an owner, a stated purpose, a controlled vocabulary where a controlled vocabulary is possible, a documented write path, and a known set of consumers. The last item is what makes deprecation possible: you cannot safely remove a field whose dependents are unknown.
Where it breaks
A picklist value is renamed in production and every historical report segmented by it breaks silently.
Related terms
- Change control
- Change control is the governed process for proposing, reviewing, releasing and recording modifications to the revenue system, its fields, definitions, automations and stage criteria.
- Revenue data model
- The revenue data model is the set of objects, relationships and required fields that every revenue-facing process reads from and writes to.
- Data quality
- Data quality is the measured fitness of records for the decisions made from them, completeness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness and uniqueness, each measured against a stated requirement.
- System of record
- A system of record is the designated authoritative source for a given entity or field, the one place where, if two systems disagree, this one is right.
Field notes on this
- You just inherited RevOps. Start with a charter.
Being told to "own revenue operations" is not a mandate. Until authority is written down, every decision you make is reversible by whoever objects loudest.
- Why four teams report four different revenue numbers
A reconciliation problem may be definitional, technical, or both. Test the metric contract before buying another data platform.