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:

    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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      Governance and Decision-Making

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      Choosing Governance Models

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      Focus Areas for Data Governance: Management Alignment

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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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      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: Privacy, Compliance, Security

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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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      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.

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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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