Setting Governance Roles and Responsibilities

Organizations and Accountabilities

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 gather and align rules. Or address gaps and overlaps in rule sets. Or interpret rules. Or establish guidelines for how to layer rules on top of each other.)

Setting Governance Roles and Responsibilities

This group of rule-makers may go by several names: a Data Governance Board, a Data Stewardship Council, etc. They may be self-organizing, or they may be called together by another body such as a Data Governance Office (DGO) that coordinates and facilitates efforts.

Next, Data Governance always includes a mechanism for resolving data-related issues. Issues are generally addressed at several levels, with a clear escalation path. A particular issue, then, may be resolved by an individual Data Steward, a Stewardship working group, the entire Data Stewardship Council, or the highest-level Data Governance Board.

Finally, the best Data Governance programs proactively strive to stop data-related problems before they begin by reducing ambiguity, establishing clear accountabilities, and disseminating data-related information to all Data Stakeholders. Such programs usually include a Data Governance Office (DGO) or its equivalent to provide alignment between stakeholders and to provide ongoing support to programs, projects, and groups that work with data.

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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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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...
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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…

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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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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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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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