Ask the Data Governance Coach: Do We Have to Call It Data Governance?
The question that I’m going to address in this column is one I get asked fairly regularly. Sadly however, there is no easy yes or no answer. There are a number of reasons for this:
Naturally I am biased, but in my view, data governance is the foundation of all other data management disciplines (and of course therefore the most important). But the fact remains that despite an increasing focus on the topic, it remains a largely misunderstood discipline.
On top of this, it is a term which is frequently misused. A few years ago, a number of Data Security software vendors were using the term to describe their products. More recently the focus on meeting the EU GDPR requirements has led to a lot of confusion as to whether Data Protection and Data Governance are the same thing and I find that the terms are being used interchangeably. (For the record, having Data Governance in place does help you meet a chunk of the GDPR requirements, but they are not the same thing).
Having more people talking about Data Governance is definitely a good thing, but unless they are all meaning the same thing, it leads to much confusion over what data governance really is.
I explored this topic in a bit more detail in this blog: Why are there so many Data Governance Definitions?
In order to understand whether Data Governance is the right title for your organization to call it, I would start with looking at how you define data governance. And this step leads nicely to the next item for consideration.
This is a topic that I covered a year ago in this column (you can read that column here).
To summarize that article, it is just not possible to have one or more people focus purely on Data Governance in smaller organizations. It’s a luxury of large organizations to be able to have separate teams responsible for each different data management discipline (e.g. Data Architecture, Data Modelling or Data Security). Going back to my point above, if data governance is the foundation for all other data management disciplines, it is only natural that the line between them can sometimes get a little blurred. As a result of this, the responsibilities of the Data Governance Team can get expanded.
So consider what is included within the scope of your data governance initiative and decide whether it be more appropriate to name the initiative and your team, either or both, something that is more aligned to the wider scope of the initiative and activities of the team.
