When we think of governance we tend to think of procedures and red tape. In most governance, I think this is a disservice to the governance functions but in data governance, it misses the point. Data governance is about enabling the organisation to be data-centric, or on that journey.
I’ve likened governance to climbing pitons. They are there to stop you from falling or at least falling very far. That comes at a small cost of keeping ourselves attached to the rocks. I am reminded of the saying “There are old climbers and bold climbers but no old bold climbers”. In data governance, we are certainly keeping the organisation safe and within legal and ethical bounds. Helping the data citizens become old/mature climbers and not bold climbers.
Data governance is wider than just this protection role and also enables data usage. Without stewards managing the data quality and keeping everyone informed of such issues, we would spend all of our time validating if the analytics is right. The data stewards are also there to help us quickly get up to speed on datasets that are new to an analyst. These governance roles through stewards are fundamental to enabling data usage.
Data governance should also be curating the data. That we have data catalogued with descriptions and guides on its usage. Curated data is like a good museum collection. Each asset is tagged and has descriptions and guides. Those guides handle the different level of knowledge of the visitors to the data collection, be they data citizen or data tourist who needs help navigating the data. Or a data analyst who is experienced in some data sets but trying to use a dataset that is new to them. Or the data scientist working on a specific dataset, and perhaps extending the description and guides.
Data governance as an enabler as well as a gatekeeper is key to organisations getting value from data. Data governance is just one part of the data strategy which enables the organisation. For more on data strategy take a look at my course on Udemy (“Getting Started on the Data Strategy”.).
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