Most governance programmes fail quietly. The policy gets written, someone files it, and eighteen months later it turns up in an audit with no owner, no evidence of enforcement, and three subsequent data migrations that nobody thought to mention. This is not a niche problem. Industry research consistently puts data ownership gaps and policy shelf-ware in the top handful of findings across sectors.
The tooling is rarely the issue. What organisations are usually short of is someone who has run infrastructure under pressure, argued a governance case to a room that does not want to hear it, and understands that a GDPR programme and a security posture are not two separate workstreams with a dotted line between them.
Thirty years of operational work across support, retail systems, fintech and large-scale data estates does not make someone a governance theorist. It makes them harder to surprise.
If you are building a governance programme from scratch, picking up someone else's unfinished one, or trying to work out why the framework you already have is not actually working -- I am available, and I have done all three.