Data governance is a discipline found within the workforce where there is a grouping of data quality and management, risk management and business process management when dealing with the handling of data found in an organization. The ultimate goal with data governance is to have control — ideally positively — over the data in the organization. Specifically, they want to control the processes and methods in which the data is handled by their data stewards.

The fundamental purpose of data governance, as described above, is to somehow mesh all the components of data together into one. What an enterprise hopes to do is find a way to ensure that their people are accountable for actions that are done that result in poor data quality. The idea with data governance is to put people in the field to ensure that the data is of high quality. More importantly, these people fix and prevent issues so that the enterprise runs more effectively and efficiently.

In the most simplest of explanations, data governance is a method in which a company gains access to data, empowers the employees to work on it effectively, creates processes to work on the data and then implements technology to aid in those processes.

The Five Initiatives of Data Governance

There are a series of five goals of initiatives found in data governance. The wording is different from enterprise to enterprise; however, the overall goals are fundamentally the same thing. They are:

  • Creating a more confident and consistent decision making team.
  • Reducing any regulatory fines and the risk of future fines.
  • Dramatically increasing and implementing new security features for data.
  • Taking data and maximizing the amount of profit that can be earned from it.
  • Ensuring there is a form of accountability based on the quality of the data.

These initiatives are put forth to ensure that the enterprise runs as effectively as possible, but more importantly, that it earns as much money as it possibly can which is the ultimate goal for a business.

Implementing Data Governance

There are two ways to implement data governance. The first is from the very top of the company. This is done through an executive memo which creates the change across the entire enterprise. This is risky, though, because it can have a shock effect on the group and could have negative impacts. The other method in which data governance can be implemented is to create a small pet project. Assign a team to this project and force them to work under the guidelines of the data governance. If it succeeds, begin to spread it across other departments. As time goes on, more of these departments will get used to the new method of doing things and it’ll have less of a shock effect. In the end, though, each enterprise is very different.