Data governance - roles and responsibilities

There are various roles that have to be defined and responsibilities allotted by data governance. This involves identifying champions and executive sponsors, assign sufficient resources to carry out their roles, secure funding for the responsibilities and define scope of governance, obtain executive sponsorship on a continuous basis, work on funds and approvals, create an education program that provides skilful training, assign responsibilities to LOBs, form Canter of Excellence for EDM or Enterprise Data Management, identify SMEs or domain experts, enterprise data architects and data stewards, develop the structure of steering committee and effectively roll out the governance program.

Security, rules, sources, process owners and data priorities –

A good EIG program also ensures validation of standards, controls and definitions, decomposition of business rules, development of working definitions, understanding business process models, developing meta and common taxonomy and defining data quality key controls and metrics.

It also defines interface standards, transformation, SLA, handling of errors, compliance, policies, auditing, reporting, metadata, master data and data standards. The program also helps agree on penalties and incentives and sets a standard to prepare a policy document.

Processes supporting governance standards

There are numerous IT and business processes that support standards of governance. These include mapping processes to appropriate individuals, developing a framework for management, building data governance framework, implementing a steady quality structure, defining route for correction of errors and future maintenance, validating transparency, validating change control, facilitating SOX compliance, updating processes, establishing change control, determining integration with IT and business processes that are already in vogue.

Technology for governance implementation and data management layer

The responsibilities of Enterprise Information Governance or EIG program extend to implementing the governance with the right technology and layer for managing data. An effective EIG program selects an appropriate technical architecture and structures it to suit the organization’s requirement, design a good SOA or Service Oriented Architecture, assess various strategies for managing data and defines data management program that is integrated.

EIG program conducts reconciliation and testing of tools, defines analytics and portal links, develops meta-data repository, develops enterprise data model, evaluates a few industry data model, identifies quality issues related to data, determines data warehouse integration and develops metadata and master strategy.

There are four major components involved in this namely organization, processes, standards and technology.

The organization component details in a clear and crisp manner the roles and responsibilities of the parties in question for providing stewardship and information governance.

The standards component plays a more extensive role as it defines the data required, its relevance, identifies the source system and the rules of the business that controlled its transformation. Metadata standards and taxonomy are fed into the metadata strategy and it also develops the implementation of these standards in an effective manner.

The processes component creates an organizational and operational workflow model by linking technology to standards. It also implements the metadata strategy by enabling and monitoring standards that are defined in a crisp manner.

Technical component effectively identifies various tools that facilitate companies to manage the information and defined processes.

This is an ideal and most effective framework that supports information governance, stewardship and metadata strategy implementation as a future vision. It is easy to align processes with functions of stewardship within this framework. Supporting both stewardship and governance, this framework also skilfully aligns metadata with technology.