Focus Areas for Data Governance: Management Alignment

Focus Areas

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.

Management Alignment

Managers may realize they need to come together to make collaborative decisions but either don’t know all the stakeholders to involve or have an obstacle to assembling them. In such cases, a formal Data Governance program can help managers make decisions with confidence.

Sometimes such programs consist primarily of councils that come together to analyze interdependencies, make decisions, and issue policies. These councils may combine Data Governance decisions with traditional IT Governance – or IT Portfolio Management – decisions.

Other times, the Data Governance program will have multiple focuses, such as supporting management and also addressing compliance or security.

 

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

  • Measure the value of data and data-related efforts.
  • Align frameworks and initiatives
  • Identify stakeholders, establish decision rights, clarify accountabilities
  • Identify SDLC embedded governance steps and loop-outs for projects
  • Monitor and report on data-related projects
  • Promote data-related messages and positions

Read Next:

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...
Read More

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Architecture, Integration

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.What other types of groups and initiatives might want...
Read More

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Privacy, Compliance, Security

This type of program typically comes into existence because of concerns about Data Information Security controls, or compliance. Compliance, in this context, may refer to regulatory compliance, contractual compliance, or compliance with internal requirements.This...
Read More

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 &...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

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...
Read More

Dealing With Politics

It’s essential that Data Governance and Stewardship program facilitators avoid being “caught up” in politics. It’s our jobs to acknowledge the realities of the situations we work with, while avoiding taking sides or engaging in behaviors that could be perceived as favoring one set of data stakeholders at the expense of others.

Read More