What Is Data Governance? A Complete Guide

Introduction

Data governance is a set of policies, procedures, and standards which helps an organization to achieve its goals by ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the information. The organization uses these policies and procedures to manage and protect its data. The framework of Data Governance comprises availability, integrity, security, and applicability.  Stakeholders use these processes to ensure that important data is protected. Data governance includes many factors that affect an organization’s data, like who, what, when, where, and why about your organization’s data.

1. What is Data Governance important?
2. What Data Governance is not?
3. Data Governance Tools
4. Governance Guiding Principles
5. Implementation of Data Governance
6. Benefits of Data Governance

1. What is Data Governance important?

Data Governance is used for ensuring that an organization’s information is protected and properly managed to build trust and accountability. Data Governance comprises data collection, revision, and standardization and making it suitable to use. It helps in data consistency.

Data Governance helps provide the right data at the right time to the right person in a formatted and suitable form. This helps in better compliance with the organization. Adopting a Data Governance organization can improve the productivity and effectiveness of an organization.

2. What Data Governance is not?

Data governance is not just about who owns the data but rather about ownership that controls data.

Data governance is not purely appropriate management. However, data governance is structured management to keep discipline on the collection and control of data.

3. Data Governance Tools

Data Governance is very important in managing all your data. Following are the most popular data governance tools:

1.OvalEdge

2.Truedat

3.Xplenty

4.Collibra

5.IBM Data Governance

4. Governance Guiding Principles

•  Integrity

Integrity and honesty are the most considered by data governance stakeholders while discussing about Data issues. Data collection practices are compliant with regulatory compliances if followed truthfully and transparently.

• Transparency

Transparency is a must in all practices implemented by the organization. Being open about Data issues and decisions is a must. It is important to discuss how an organization is using external and internal data. 

• Auditability

Auditability is important for Data processes in data governance. Suitable standards should be used to measure the utility and to audit the data. Collected data should be audited as well.

• Accountability

It is the responsibility of stakeholders to assign accountability so that everyone gains access to the data through the standard procedure.

• Standardization

For making data usable for various cases, data governance will introduce standardization.

• Change Management

Owing to some discrepancies, a need can occur to change the data.  Training data in the process is always a risk. Change management activities are properly insured by data governance from time to time. 

5. Implementation of Data Governance

Data governance can be implemented by following the given steps below:

• Step 1: Establish Goals for Data Governance

Identification of improvement areas is the best initiative to establish a goal for Data governance. The areas which have a significant impact on the organization should be picked up first rather than going for all. Goal setting can resolve data sources that create duplicate data and manages confidential user data. 

• Step 2: Efficient availability of data

 identify required data points and their sources related to the goal. For example, CRM and customer support is the potential data source if you want to merge duplicate customer data. To make data easily accessible, integrate those data sources with a central system.

• Step 3: Describe Data Governance Roles and Policies

 stakeholders should be designated by organizations with relevant data management roles, data administration, and data ownership. To ensure the success of data governance initiatives, a collaboration between IT and concerning departments should be established by the organization. Policies for data usage, access, and integrity should be included mandatory.

• Step 4: Make a blueprint of  Your Implementation.

A lot of effort is required to handle data, and it is a risky aim as well. An organization’s data can be mixed by data duplication, loss, or violation. Therefore risk reduction activities should be planned accordingly.

Above data governance guiding principles can be used to craft your data governance program. Be realistic about your policy because different organizations function differently. Those departments should be picked up that you can easily work with and expand as you progress. 

• Step 5: Form a Feedback Mechanism

 Data governance is an effective initiative and involves a culture of continuous improvement. As your data governance program matures, your goals may change, and you may walk into difficulty. You should regularly check where you stand and or if you need to correct the Implementation or redefine the standards.

6. Benefits of Data Governance

• Authorized Accountability for Data: The actions people take with data helps in recognizing the access and will be held liable for data destruction, violation, or loss.
• Improved Operational Efficiency and Effectiveness: Data governance reduces the time it takes to achieve a task, the effort required to undertake it, and the cost of completing it successfully. 
• Approve  Data Process: If suitable and organized people are involved in organizing data governance, data Processes will be validated and protected. Data governance not only ensures systems run smoothly and efficiently but also that errors are eliminated, and that best practices are constantly leveraged.

Conclusion

Data governance has a positive effect on the quality and efficiency of the data. We can see that companies can control their data, and quality is increasing simultaneously.

When organizations implement data governance, they need to have a more structured approach to managing and protecting the data. Data governance helps in data security, increase data quality, and reduce data management costs.

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