Data governance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Data governance encompasses the people, processes and procedures required to create a consistent, enterprise view of a company's data in order to:
- Increase consistency & confidence in decision making
- Decrease the risk of regulatory fines
- Improve data security
Data Governance initiatives improve data quality by assigning a team responsible solely for data's accuracy, accessibility, consistency, and completeness, among other metrics. This team usually consists of executive leadership, project management, line-of-business managers, and data stewards. The team usually employs some form of methodology for tracking and improving enterprise data, such as six sigma, and tools for data mapping, profiling, cleansing and monitoring data.
Data governance initiatives are usually inspired by the desire to comply with the law (compliance), or the desire to use enterprise data to improve knowledge-worker efficiency. Most large companies have many applications and databases that can't easily share information. Therefore, knowledge-workers within large organizations often don't have access to the information they need to best do their jobs. When they do have the data, the data quality may be lacking. By setting up a data governance practice, these problems can be mitigated.
