Starting a Data Governance Program

Getting Started

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.

Starting a Data Governance Program

Those stakeholders will want to know the WHO / WHAT / WHEN / WHERE / WHY / HOW of your program before they decide to support it, so you’ll need to anticipate their questions and have preliminary answers, even if they’re only assumptions until you do your actual program design.

You’ll want to build the type of program that your stakeholders will be excited about. The Data Governance programs we’ve seen that are the most successful are ones with a clear focus, metrics that excite leadership, a value proposition that everyone can get behind, and a clear message.

Don’t worry if this isn’t real obvious to you. After all, we’re all familiar with the concept of not being able to see the forest for the trees. What if you ARE one of the trees?

Consider getting a fresh viewpoint from someone within your organization (or from outside) who can help you describe your vision and set an approach to:

Develop a value statement
Prepare a roadmap
Plan and fund
Design
Deploy
Govern
Monitor, measure, report

Read Next:

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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: 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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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...