Successful data governance is a collaborative effort across many roles within an organization. Policy and rules set by a cross-functional team supported by tools is the recipe for success! Many organizations make the mistake of handing over all the responsibilities of data governance to the IT team. The IT Team needs to be involved but they simply cannot manage the task of Data Governance without the insight of data owners from other business functions and data managers who specialize in working with different types of data sets.
To get buy in from the entire organization it is important to assign roles and responsibilities prior to working on the processes.
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The data governance organization as we would like to call it, is made up of people at different levels, making a larger team with different and specific responsibilities. They work together to create a data pyramid. Let’s look at what each of these are in detail below:
This is specific to each business unit and consists of Data Stewards who could be either managers or individual contributors. They play a very important role in framing the data governance strategy since they produce and use the data, and create the definitions of data for their business unit. The data that they record, will be passed on to teams to better understand what processes need to be implemented or changed.
The tactical level consists of Data Domain Stewards (DDS) and Data Steward Coordinators (DSC) and these are ideally people from cross-functional business units. The DDS are Managers of specific subject areas, and DSC are Managers of specific business units.
Organizations often find it difficult to fill up this level as these are people from various teams coming together and sharing data received from the Data Stewards from the operation level. It is crucial to identify the right people for these roles so that decision-making is unbiased and strategic. In certain cases, organizations decide that no decisions are made at the tactical level but at the strategic level. The DSC usually do not have the authority to make decisions and their role is more focused on coordination, reporting, documentation, and training.
Below are the responsibilities of the Data Domain Stewards:
At the top level sits the Data Governance Council. The team consists of people from the senior management of each business unit and members of the IT team.
The operational Data Stewards pass on their observations and challenges to the Data Steward Coordinators. The Data Domain Stewards and Data Steward Coordinators analyze the information available at the enterprise level and this is presented to the strategic level where important decisions can be made. This level is important as decisions are made that are applicable to the organization for business processes or a data domain.
The escalation matrix also works in the same manner. Any data issues or challenges can get escalated to the strategic level if the decision-making authority lies solely at this level for the organization. Sometimes in a rare case, escalations can reach an executive level. Therefore, any information needs to be cascaded down from the strategic level after decisions are made, processes are changed, or resolutions are defined.
Related reading: What is data governance? And here are 3 data governance framework examples. |
At the top-most level of this data pyramid is the executive level with the Steering Committee that sponsors and approves the data governance strategy. The people in the committee need to be knowledgeable about the program, and the organizational structure and are usually from the top management of the organization. If this committee does not exist, then the team members have to be identified by the Data Governance Council. As part of this level, there is a Chief Data Officer who would lead the program, be responsible for funding, and hiring team members wherever necessary.
This team consists of the Data Governance Chair and the Data Governance Partners and each of their roles differ, but they work with all the three levels across the organization – operational, tactical, and strategic.
The Data Governance Chair administer and oversee the data governance program, and their role is similar to an operations function in an organization. They coordinate and ensure the Data Governance Council are cascading communications and they coordinate with the other levels to ensure smooth functioning of the program, reporting on processes and challenges, if any.
The Data Governance Partners on the other hand are responsible for regulation and compliance. The team consists of IT members that are knowledgeable in data and system architecture, security, and other data domains. This team can include data specialists such as data quality analysts and data architects.
Data governance is a continuous practice, so, you need to plan, and add roles and responsibilities while working on processes and prior to implementing tools. Additionally, you need to be flexible so that you can adapt and make changes as you go.
It may so happen that you might need to involve a different type of data owner that you had missed 6 months after implementing your data governance strategy, so it is best to keep an open mind and explain this to your stakeholders in advance. We recommend reading about the best practices in your industry to help you get started.
Once you have the right team members in place, it is easier to work towards the processes and policies. However, it is also important to analyze your current business infrastructure, the business processes, and the data flow between those. This will be an indicator of the tools you will need to execute your data governance plan.
For example, if you do not have an application integration software, integrating the data between your business processes and ERP, you could have data silos and data duplication. And if you are struggling with integrations, data entry, maintaining data quality, and master data distribution, you can consider our Data Governance Solution. To get started, download our factsheet from the link below to learn more about our master data solution for Dynamics 365 and understand whether it would be a good fit for your organization or not.