This type of program typically comes into existence in conjunction with a major system acquisition, development effort, or update that requires new levels of cross-functional decision-making and accountabilities.

Focus on Architecture

What other types of groups and initiatives might want such a program focus? Enterprise initiatives such as

  • A move to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), with its need for well-governed data
  • A new focus on Metadata
  • A Master Data Management (MDM) initiative
  • Enterprise Data Management (EDM)
  • Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
  • Standardization on platforms
  • Changes to systems due to new business focus or Merger and Acquisitions activity

A charter for this type of program may hold Data Governance and Stewardship participants accountable to:

  • Ensure consistent data definitions
  • Support architectural policies and standards
  • Support Metadata Programs, SOA, Master Data Management, Enterprise Data Management (EDM)
  • Bring cross-functional attention to integration challenges
  • Identify stakeholders, establish decision rights, clarify accountabilities

Read Next:

Goals and Principles for Data Governance

What do you want Data Governance to accomplish?  Regardless of the focus of your program, chances are you hope to accomplish the following universal goals for Data Governance programs: Goal – Enable better decision-making Goal – Reduce operational friction Goal –...

Establishing a Data Governance Office

Most organizations that begin a formal Data Governance and Stewardship effort need a support team to facilitate and coordinate activities of councils, stewards, and stakeholders. This support team may be individual contributors who have been doing this work informally...

Working with Data Stewards

Approaches to Assigning Data Ownership and Stewardship Organizations can take multiple approaches to assigning Data Owners and Data Stewards for enterprise data. In doing so, they need to consider several factors and answer the following questions.Question #1:  Should...

Focus Areas for Data Governance

All Data Governance programs are not alike. Quite the contrary: programs can use the same framework, employ the same processes, and still appear very different. Why is this? It’s because of what the organization is trying to make decisions about or enforce rules for....

Governance and Decision-Making

Remember our (long) definition for Data Governance? “Data Governance is a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and...

Governance Communications

At a Data Governance Conference in Orlando, Florida (USA), a group of managers of successful Data Governance programs reached a startling consensus: They agreed that Data Governance is actually somewhere between 80 and 95% communications!How can this be? They said...

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence (BI)

This type of program typically comes into existence in conjunction with a specific data warehouse, data mart, or BI tool. These types of efforts require tough data-related decisions, so organizations often implement governance to help make initial decisions, to...

Defining Data Governance

How you define your program will influence your ability to manage it — to keep all participants on focus, in sync, and striving toward the same goals.

Implementing Change Management

Most organizations have string change management – or at least change control – mechanisms for technology. They usually have change management for software applications. They have change management for websites. And yet, many organizations do not practice structured...

Governance and Issue Resolution

One of the three most important jobs of a Data Governance program is to help resolve data-related issues. These may be conflicting data definitions, data usage concerns, or problems with how data is sourced, how it is integrated, how it is protected, or a myriad of...