Data Governance

Welcome to the Data Governance Blog! On this website we’ll arm you with the knowledge you’ll need to research, launch, and run a successful data governance program within your organization. Whether you are at a Fortune 500 company or a small non-profit organization, the data governance principles remain the same and they will bring value to your company.

Data governance is not a hardware, software, or manpower solution. It is an organizational strategy and methodology for documenting and implementing business rules and controls around your organizations valuable data. It is bringing cross-functional teams together to identify data issues that impact the company or organization as a whole. It is working with the business and IT to develop solutions for critical data issues. You do all of this through a data governance council made up of leaders across the business working with their teams for research, analysis, and implementation.

Feel free to browse around the site and explore the many links to articles, vendors, and resources. From data governance frameworks to data governance best practices and strategy, we strive to be the only source you need for every DG related.

To help get you jump started on the Data Governance blog, feel free to click around the links on the site. Also, here is some suggested reading on the Data Governance Blog (these have been the most popular articles) is:

• Building a Data Governance Council
• A Data Governance Framework
• Information from a past Data Governance Conference, part 2 is here
• 5 Days to building a Data Governance Maturity Model
• An Information Management Fairy Tale
• A Data Governance Definition
• 8 Reasons Data Governance Fails
• Branding Your Data Governance Program

One of the key components of data governance is assisting in determining who the data stewards (some say data owners) are for the critical and/or enterprise data. I tend to like the term steward because ‘owner’ implies full-control over the data, but nonetheless, the terms are generally used synonymously.

It is extremely important that the data governance office provides guidance to the business on who the ‘go to person’ is for the different data domains. IT doesn’t own the data, the business does (despite what anyone may tell you!). A great analogy on how “IT People are like Forklift Drivers” is provided here by Michael R. Farnum. He wrote it so clearly that I won’t even bother to elaborate, but rather urge you to check out his blog post.