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 and approach to:

    1. Develop a value statement
    2. Prepare a roadmap
    3. Plan and fund
    4. Design
    5. Deploy
    6. Govern
    7. Monitor, measure, report

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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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      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...
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      Governance Communications

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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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      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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      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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      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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      Defining Organizational Structures

      There is no single “right” way to organize Data Governance and Stewardship. Some organizations have distinct Data Governance programs. Others embed Data Governance activities into Data Quality or Master Data Management programs.

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      Focus Areas for Data Governance: Management Alignment

      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.Managers may realize they need to come together to make...
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      Working with Data Stewards

      Approaches to Assigning Data Ownership and Stewardship Organizations can take multiple approaches to assigning Data Owners and Data Stewards for enterprise data. In doing so, they need to consider several factors and answer the following questions.Question #1:  Should...
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