What is data governance? Roles, agreements and evidence

Data governance has a bad name, and it earned it. In many organisations it is a forty page document nobody opens and that has never changed a single number.

Governance that works is something else: per term an owner, a source that counts and a definition that holds everywhere. Nothing more, and that is already plenty of work.

The roles that actually carry it

Governance without named people is a document. With named people it is a way of working.

An owner of a term decides what it means. A steward of the source makes sure entry is right. The builder makes sure the agreement holds technically, so it cannot be bypassed per report. And the user in the work reports what is wrong, and is heard.

That last role is forgotten most often and is worth the most. Whoever keys in orders knows a field is being misused long before a report builder does.

What happens when someone disputes a number

Every argument about a number ends in a decision by an owner, and that decision then holds everywhere.

This is the test. In an organisation without governance the argument ends in a new report. With governance it ends with an owner who confirms or adjusts, and that adjustment lands in one place. See data quality has two owners for the split between source and meaning.

The layers the agreement lives in

On top sits evidence: which version applied, who decided, and where the record came from.

Access, agreement and evidence belong in the platform, not in a spreadsheet. Without lineage a definition is an opinion. With lineage every number can be retold, even if the source has changed since.

Where governance usually stalls

• Starting too broad. Fifty terms at once is a programme that quietly dies. Five terms that get argued about is a result.
• Ownership assigned to a department. A department does not make decisions; a person does.
• No measurement. If you do not track how often a number is still disputed, you do not know whether it works.
• Rules only, no way forward. Governance that merely forbids gets routed around.

See implementing data governance for a ninety day approach, and what is a data contract for making an agreement binding.

In short

Governance is not policy but possession: someone owns a term, someone owns the source, and the evidence sits in the platform.