Data Governance
Data Governance
This domain tests authority, decision rights, and accountability. The exam asks you to distinguish governance from management, design an operating model, place roles correctly, and show how policies become enforceable standards.
Core rules and concepts
- Data governance is the exercise of authority and control (planning, monitoring, enforcement) over data management, through shared decision-making. It answers who decides, who is accountable, and how disputes are resolved; it does not perform data quality, modeling, or integration work itself.
- A governance programme needs a charter, scope, principles, an operating model, policies and standards, decision rights, issue escalation, metrics, and a communication plan.
- Operating models: centralized (one council decides), decentralized (domains decide within enterprise principles), and federated (hybrid with domain councils reporting to an enterprise council). Choose by organizational culture and regulatory pressure, not by fashion.
- Roles: data owner (business accountability for a data domain), data steward (defines, monitors, and improves quality and definitions), data custodian (technical storage, backup, access), Chief Data Officer, data governance council, and data governance office.
- Policies state intent and are mandatory; standards specify measurable requirements; procedures describe execution; guidelines are recommended. A policy without a standard, a control, and an escalation path is unenforceable.
- Governance domains include data architecture, quality, metadata, master data, security and privacy, and reference data. Metrics include decision cycle time, policy compliance, issue resolution, and stewardship coverage.
Worked example
Marketing defines an active customer as anyone with a login in the last 12 months; Finance defines it as anyone with a transaction in the last 12 months. Both publish reports to the executive committee. The data governance council, chaired by the CDO, rules that active customer is a governed term. The data owner for Customer, a business executive, decides the definition after consultation; the steward documents it in the business glossary with the rule and effective date; the custodian implements it in the warehouse; internal audit checks compliance. The council does not choose the definition itself; it enforces the process and resolves deadlock. That separation of decision rights is what the exam rewards.
Traps that cost marks
- Equating governance with data management or with IT; governance sets direction and controls.
- Giving the council operational tasks such as cleansing data or building reports.
- Confusing data owner (accountable, business) with data custodian (technical safekeeping).
- Writing principles without standards, controls, and escalation.
- Attempting enterprise-wide scope first; start with a high-value domain and expand.