In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive business environment, data governance is more important than ever. Businesses have the chance to capture large amounts of data from various sources, but they also need a way to maximize the value, manage the risks and lower the costs of maintaining it.

What Is Data Governance?

Data governance is a set of roles, processes, policies, metrics and standards that streamline the use of data in helping businesses achieve goals. It sets a standard for responsibilities and processes that ensure the security and quality of data throughout the business, defining who can take what action, with what data, using what methods and under what circumstances.

Any business working with large volumes of data needs a data governance strategy that explains how the business benefits from consistent responsibilities and processes. It helps the entire organization understand what data needs to be controlled and why, and it establishes clear responsibility, accountability and roles related to the data.

Benefits for Business

  • Data governance provides a consistent view and standard terminology for data.
  • It provides stewardship and ownership of data for resolving data quality and data integrity issues, data protection issues, including a plan for data accuracy, consistency and completeness.
  • It makes it easier for staff to identify the location of data assets. This makes assets usable and easier to relate to business strategies and outcomes.
  • Data governance presents a basic framework to provide business users with a consistent of data across business activities and users.
  • It provides a method for meeting the constraints of government compliance and regulations, such as the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and specific industry requirements.
  • IT brings the human element into a data-driven world. It presents the best practices and codes of conduct in data management, which keeps everything consistent across assets.
  • Data governance maintains the audits of changes that occur with data over time and traces its origin for compliance. It also ensures that the data within an organization comes from trusted sources and is appropriate for business objectives.
Back to Glossary