Focus Areas for Data Governance: Data Quality

This type of program typically comes into existence because of issues around the quality, integrity, or usability of data.

It may be sponsored by a Data Quality group or a business team that needs better quality data. (For example: Data Acquisition or Mergers & Acquisitions.)

Focus on Data Quality

These types of programs almost always involve Data Quality software, which may be used by business staff, technical staff, Data Stewards, Data Governance teams, or others.

These types of programs may begin with an enterprise focus, or efforts may be local to a department or a project. Sometimes, such governance groups adopt the philosophy of “act local, but think global” so the program will be ready to scale should other groups in the enterprise want to reap the benefits being realized by early adopters.

What type of data do such programs generally address in early iterations of the program?

Sets of Master Data
Sensitive Data
Acquired Data
Data of interest to stakeholder groups

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

Set direction for Data Quality
Collect Data Quality rules from across the organization into a set that stakeholders, Data Stewards, and other Data Governance participants can access
Reconcile gaps, overlaps, and inconsistencies in Data Quality rules
Monitor Data Quality
Report status for quality-focused initiatives
Identify stakeholders, establish decision rights, clarify accountabilities

Read Next:

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...

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Policy, Standards, Strategy

This type of program typically comes into existence because some group within the organization needs support from a cross-functional leadership body. For example, companies moving from silo development to enterprise systems may find their application development teams...

Assigning Data Ownership

One of the tenets of Data Governance is that enterprise data doesn’t “belong” to individuals. It is an asset that belongs to the enterprise. Still, it needs to be managed…

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Management Alignment

This type of program typically comes into existence when managers find it difficult to make “routine” data-related management decisions because of their potential effect on operations or compliance efforts.Managers may realize they need to come together to make...

Funding Models: Funding Data Governance

The DGI Data Governance Framework addresses funding two ways: Obtaining funding and support is a phase in the Data Governance Life Cycle Funding is part of one of the components of the framework. What type of funding is needed? Data Governance programs need to...

Starting a Data Governance Program

A successful Data Governance program does not begin with the design of the program! Before you start deciding who goes on what committee, you should be clear about your program’s value statement. You should have developed a roadmap to share with stakeholders. Those...

Choosing Governance Models

It’s important to define the organizational structure of your Data Governance program. But before you can do that you have to define your governance model at a higher level. You need to consider what types of decisions your governance bodies will be called upon to...

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...

Engaging Stewards and Stakeholders

It seems like there are two types of Data Governance and Stewardship programs: Thriving ones, with highly-engaged stakeholders, and Ones whose futures are in question, since stakeholders and stewards are only sporadically involved or give only weak support to the...

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...