Governance and Decision-Making

Processes and Alignments

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.”

Focus on Architecture

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.

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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 –...
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Governance and Alignment

Data Governance is a balancing act. On the one hand, you need to exert control over how groups create data, manage data, and use data. On the other hand, you need to promote appropriate levels of flexibility. You need to ensure that data-related efforts support the...
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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...
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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...
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Demonstrating Value

Everything an organization does should tie to one of three universal value drivers. Data Governance efforts MUST tie back to one or more of these drivers. And YOU must communicate how it does.

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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...
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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.

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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...
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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...
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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....
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