DataX: Data Management and Governance

Data Management and Governance asks you to separate accountability from activity: who decides, who does the work, and which artefact records the decision. Exam items usually present an organisational symptom - conflicting KPI definitions, an unowned dataset, a catalogue nobody uses - and ask which governance mechanism actually fixes it.

Core rules and concepts

• Governance sets decision rights; management executes. A policy states intent and is mandatory. A standard makes that intent measurable ("customer_id is a 16-character uppercase code"). A procedure describes the steps. Guidelines are optional advice.
• Roles are distinct. The data owner is a business role accountable for a data domain, its quality and access decisions. The data steward curates definitions, the catalogue and quality rules day to day. IT/custodians apply technical controls. The CDO sets strategy and escalates; merging these roles by default is a design error.
• Metadata has three layers: business (glossary, definitions), technical (schemas, jobs, lineage) and operational (run logs, freshness, volumes). A catalogue with no business definitions is an inventory, not a glossary.
• Master data (customer, product, supplier) is shared and slow-changing; reference data is the code sets used to classify (currency, country); transactional data records events. Confusing the three produces duplicate golden records.
• Lifecycle: create, store, use, share, archive, dispose. Retention and disposal rules come from legal or regulatory obligations and must be enforced, not merely documented.
• Measure governance: glossary coverage, count of certified reports, quality score against thresholds, issue mean time to resolve, access requests met within SLA.

Worked example

Two regions report different "active customer" counts: one counts any purchase in 24 months, the other 12 months and excludes deactivated accounts. The fix is not another dashboard. The customer domain owner approves one definition with an explicit formula and exclusions; the steward records it in the glossary and attaches a quality rule with a threshold; the report is certified and older variants are deprecated with a date. The exam wants that sequence: owner decides, standard defines, steward documents, system enforces.

Traps

Buying a catalogue tool and calling it governance; letting IT own business definitions; writing policies with no measurable standard; treating stewardship as purely administrative; ignoring change control for reference data.