Focus Areas for Data Governance: Data Quality

This type of program typically comes into existence because of issues around the quality, integrity, or usability of data.

It may be sponsored by a Data Quality group or a business team that needs better quality data. (For example: Data Acquisition or Mergers & Acquisitions.)

Focus on Data Quality

These types of programs almost always involve Data Quality software, which may be used by business staff, technical staff, Data Stewards, Data Governance teams, or others.

These types of programs may begin with an enterprise focus, or efforts may be local to a department or a project. Sometimes, such governance groups adopt the philosophy of “act local, but think global” so the program will be ready to scale should other groups in the enterprise want to reap the benefits being realized by early adopters.

What type of data do such programs generally address in early iterations of the program?

Sets of Master Data
Sensitive Data
Acquired Data
Data of interest to stakeholder groups

A charter for this type of program may hold Data Governance and Stewardship participants accountable to:

Set direction for Data Quality
Collect Data Quality rules from across the organization into a set that stakeholders, Data Stewards, and other Data Governance participants can access
Reconcile gaps, overlaps, and inconsistencies in Data Quality rules
Monitor Data Quality
Report status for quality-focused initiatives
Identify stakeholders, establish decision rights, clarify accountabilities

Read Next:

Engaging Stewards and Stakeholders

It seems like there are two types of Data Governance and Stewardship programs: Thriving ones, with highly-engaged stakeholders, and Ones whose futures are in question, since stakeholders and stewards are only sporadically involved or give only weak support to the...

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Management Alignment

This type of program typically comes into existence when managers find it difficult to make “routine” data-related management decisions because of their potential effect on operations or compliance efforts.Managers may realize they need to come together to make...

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…

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence (BI)

This type of program typically comes into existence in conjunction with a specific data warehouse, data mart, or BI tool. These types of efforts require tough data-related decisions, so organizations often implement governance to help make initial decisions, to...

Focus Areas for Data Governance: Architecture, Integration

This type of program typically comes into existence in conjunction with a major system acquisition, development effort, or update that requires new levels of cross-functional decision-making and accountabilities.What other types of groups and initiatives might want...

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.

Governance Communications

At a Data Governance Conference in Orlando, Florida (USA), a group of managers of successful Data Governance programs reached a startling consensus: They agreed that Data Governance is actually somewhere between 80 and 95% communications!How can this be? They said...

Governance and Issue Resolution

One of the three most important jobs of a Data Governance program is to help resolve data-related issues. These may be conflicting data definitions, data usage concerns, or problems with how data is sourced, how it is integrated, how it is protected, or a myriad of...

Funding Models: Funding Data Governance

The DGI Data Governance Framework addresses funding two ways: Obtaining funding and support is a phase in the Data Governance Life Cycle Funding is part of one of the components of the framework. What type of funding is needed? Data Governance programs need to...

Defining Organizational Structures

There is no single “right” way to organize Data Governance and Stewardship. Some organizations have distinct Data Governance programs. Others embed Data Governance activities into Data Quality or Master Data Management programs.