Data Governance Oversight Team Responsibilities

For data governance and data intelligence success, an organization must have a data governance oversight and management team or committee (team) in place. This team is the champion for data governance at the organization. This team has important responsibilities which we will mention in this blog post. We will also cover the various phases that the team will go through.

Here are the some of the responsibilities for a data governance management and oversight team:

1. Setting and sharing actionable goals with others along with metrics – The team should set data governance goals and communicate these goals to others. And the team will need to create metrics and share the results supporting improved data-use, not just metrics on data governance activity.
2. Recruiting and assigning data stewards – The team should match people with roles that play to their strengths. The team should only assign users to data stewardship roles when they are ready. Note that data governance may require some job description changes. The team will need to enlist “just-in-time” subject matter experts when they are needed.
3. Providing training in data governance goals, processes, and tools – The team should make sure the necessary on-going training occurs including data governance-related lunch-and-learns, organizational web pages, meetings, and webinars. There should be a focus on training the trainers. There also needs to be training of the broader community on the data governance entry points (data requests and data quality issues). Remember that there should be training of the data stewards to bring in collaborators or request support.
4. Supporting data steward activity – A key responsibility of the team is supporting the data stewards. This includes reviewing the content created by new data stewards. The team should provide supportive and constructive feedback to data stewards. The team can add review into the data request workflow such as adding a non-required step to the review process. Review only until the new data steward does not need it. Data governance needs to have a customer service perspective and the team needs to promote this. Broader data governance buy-in will erode if response is not timely. Data stewards buy-in will erode if they are asked to do things they are not properly trained-in or given sufficient time and support. The team needs to step-in to move along anything that needs it. Team members should perform one on ones with data stewards and review their activities and progress.
5. Acting as data stewards - When there are unfilled or non-committed data steward roles, the team should be assigned the requests that come in from users and handle these requests.
6. Creating standards, examples, and templates – The team supports content standards, defining attributes and other data governance coding standards that will be helpful to the users of data and the data stewards.
7. Getting initial content created – The team needs to focus on getting the necessary content in a central knowledgebase. Reaching a content tipping point is important in achieving data governance success. Therefore, the team needs to make sure that the importing of existing content occurs and that there is curation of high priority content. The team should try to automate content imports where possible and have on-going synchronization (which is even better)
8. Resolving collisions - Collisions will occur, and the team will need to resolve these collisions. The management and oversight team must be a point-of-escalation. The team must also manage disagreements of business glossary definitions, policy attribute classifications, data quality rules and data-related ownership. Remember that discovering differing opinions (collisions) is a good thing. The team must allow for different context to co-exist.
9. Performing the necessary administrative tasks – As with other groups, there will be admin tasks that the team will need to do such as facilitating meetings, creating agendas, and sharing meeting notes. The team should make sure that there is a data governance / data catalog tool in place, such as the Data Cookbook. And the team will need to handle the administration of the tool including user management and configuration.

The team needs to realize that they cannot do everything right way and realize the different phases of data governance oversight and management: 1) getting started and planning, 2) implementing and training, 3) ongoing support and management, and 4) expansion.

• In the getting started and planning phase the teams sets the data governance roadmap and priorities, gets leadership buy-in and commitment, define data steward roles, designs data-related workflows, and assigns data stewards to roles. Getting commitment includes financial support, resource prioritization and endorsement.
• In the implementing and training phase the team works on the creation of initial data governance content, training of data stewards and other data governance participants, reviewing new data stewards’ content for feedback and serving as acting data stewards when needed.
• In the ongoing support and management phase the team continues providing support to data stewards in their response to requests, continues on-going training and making sure that the necessary resources are available.
• In the expansion phase the team looks at adding to the data governance framework (such as new workflows, automation, and steward roles) and expanding the scope: data intelligence content scope (such as reference data, quality monitoring, lineage, etc.), organizational scope (getting other departments involved), data system scope (adding additional data systems), and stakeholder scope (educating additional staff).

We hope that this blog post helps your data governance management and oversight team. We covered the various responsibilities of the team and the different phases that the team will go through for successful data governance / data intelligence at the organization. Other resources regarding data governance and data intelligence management and oversight can be found here.  Additional data governance resources (blog posts, videos, and recorded webinars) can be found at www.datacookbook.com/dg.

IData has a solution, the Data Cookbook, that can aid the employees and the organization in its data governance, data intelligence, data stewardship and data quality initiatives. IData also has experts that can assist with data governance, reporting, integration and other technology services on an as needed basis. Feel free to contact us and let us know how we can assist.

Photo Credit: StockSnap_FRU4Y0OBEY_OversightTeam_BP #B1197