What is Data Governance?

Data governance is a structure put in place allowing organisations to proactively manage data quality. There is no one size fits all approach. For it to work, it must fit with the organisation’s culture, structure and practices. The basic components of a data governance framework are policy, processes, and roles and responsibilities.

• Policy - Having a policy stating that your company will “do” data governance is a key part of the framework. Without it, there will be no authority to change the way your organisation thinks about and manages its data.
• Processes - These are the processes (and the deliverables arising out of those processes) which need to be followed in order to manage your data quality. They can include things such as data quality reporting and data quality issue management.
• Roles and Responsibilities - Who is responsible for data quality in your organisation and the scope and extent of their responsibilities. In order to maintain a consistently good level of data quality, it must be proactively managed, ensuring that it is captured accurately and deterioration in its quality is prevented.

Who is needed in a successful Data Governance framework?

For data governance to be successful, realistically you need the whole organisation to be acting with a data governance mindset as everyone tends to be involved with the data at one stage. You can separate people into the below 4 roles:

1. Data Owner(s) – A senior person within your organisation who signs up to be accountable for the quality of a dataset.
2. Data Steward(s) – Responsible for the quality of a particular set of data on a day-to-day basis.
3. Data Producer(s) – People in an organisation who create or capture data.
4. Data Consumer(s) – The people who use the data in their day to day jobs.

Why is Data Governance important?

As the creation of data volumes and sources continue to grow, the big challenge that companies face is how to continue to improve the value that they get from their data – without compromising its integrity. Data Governance ultimately helps you to find, understand and then use the data properly – helping with time to value.

Another huge driver of Data Governance is the GDPR. A lot of the new regulations put in place (such as The Right to Erasure & Subject Access Requests) will demand high levels of governance in order to comply. Having the Processes, Policy and Roles in place gives you the authority to implement and facilitates a consistent and repeatable approach for the necessary data governance to comply.