Data Governance and Stewardship
What this domain tests
The exam tests whether you can design decision rights, accountability and policy enforcement around data, not whether you can recite a definition. Expect scenarios on operating models, owner/steward/custodian roles, escalation through governance bodies, and outcome-based metrics.
Core rules
- DAMA defines data governance as the exercise of authority and control (planning, monitoring, enforcement) over data management. Governance sets what is decided and who decides; data management does the work.
- Decision domains typically cover data principles, quality, metadata, access and lifecycle. For each, name the accountable body and the escalation path.
- Operating models: centralized (one enterprise team), decentralized (domains own everything), federated/hybrid (enterprise standards, domain execution). Pure extremes usually stall.
- Data owner is accountable for a domain such as Customer and approves definitions and access policy. Data steward executes: curates glossary terms, resolves quality issues, monitors rules. Data custodian runs the platform - backups, provisioning, storage. Owners are business; custodians are usually IT.
- Bodies: executive steering (funding, priorities), governance council (cross-domain policy and disputes), stewardship working groups (operational issues).
- Policy hierarchy: policy → standard → procedure → guideline. A policy with no owner and no enforcement mechanism is decoration.
Worked example
Finance reports 48,000 active customers; Marketing reports 61,000 from the same CRM. What is the first governance action? Reasoning: this is a definition and decision-rights problem, not a data-quality bug. (1) Route it to the Customer data owner, not to IT. (2) The owner convenes the Finance and Marketing stewards to agree the term, for example purchased within 12 months. (3) The governance council approves the definition; it is published in the business glossary with a linked quality rule. (4) Both reports reference the certified definition. (5) The steward monitors the rule and reports exceptions to the council. The deliverable is a decision with an accountable owner and a measurable rule - not a one-off reconciliation.
Traps that cost marks
- Naming the steward as accountable; accountability sits with the owner.
- Treating governance as a documentation project with no decision rights or escalation.
- Letting the council do operational triage instead of setting policy.
- Confusing data governance with IT governance, or with buying a tool.
- Measuring activity (meetings held) rather than outcomes (issue resolution time, glossary coverage of certified metrics).