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 when, under what circumstances, using what methods.”

Yes, Data Governance is about enforcing rules. But just as important, usually, is ensuring that the right stakeholders are involved in making the rules.

Sometimes – especially for compliance-related rules – it’s easy to know who should decide on a rule. But other times it’s hard. And most organizations have lots of examples from their own histories of decisions that were made without input from key stakeholders. They can tell stories of the problems created when the right groups were not consulted.

So a best practice is that before any rule is created or any data-related decision is made, a prior decision must be addressed: who gets to make the decision, and when, and using what process?

This practice is called establishing “Decision Rights” for the decision.

It is the responsibility of Data Governance program facilitators to know (or discover) who should be involved in making different types of governance decisions. It is also generally a responsibility of the program to facilitate (and to sometimes document and store) the collection of decision rights that are the “metadata” of data-related decisions.

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.

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.

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....

Setting Governance Roles and Responsibilities

Who does what in a Data Governance program? First, a group of individuals (or a hierarchy of groups) representing a cross-section of stakeholder groups makes a set of rules in the form of policies, standards, requirements, guidelines, or data definitions. (Or, they...

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...