Data Governance

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.

In my post ‘8 Reasons why Data Governance fails‘, Carol S asked, “Does anyone have experience in developing a data governance strategy?”. I haven’t talked with her about this yet, but I’d like to recommend the following high-level path to launching Data Governance in an organization. This is very high level (read: quick & dirty), so you’ll need to take time and break these steps down into discrete tasks.

1. Start a Data Initiative to fix a few specific problems
Before the words ‘data governance’ are ever uttered, start an initiative to fix a few problems that span the enterprise. Make sure these are problems that bother people so that you’ll get buy-in. As part of this initiative, build a business team that will work on the problems (they’ll later become your Data Stewardship Council).
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