Data Governance: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Ingredients of Data Governance: Tools

A lot of the tasks related to data governance can benefit from automation. Machine learning tools and automatic policy applications or suggestions can accelerate data governance tasks. In this chapter we will review some of the tools commonly referred to when discussing data governance.

When evaluating a data governance process/system, pay attention to the capabilities mentioned in this chapter. The following discussion concerns tasks and tools that can augment complete end-to-end support for the processes involved in, and the personnel responsible for, data governance organization. We’ll dive into the various processes and solutions in more detail in later chapters.

The Enterprise Dictionary

To begin, it is important to understand how an organization works with data and enables data governance. Usually, there is an enterprise dictionary or an enterprise policy book of some kind.

The first of these documents, the enterprise dictionary, is one that can take many shapes, from a paper document to a tool that encodes or automates certain policies. It is an agreed-upon repository of the information types (infotypes) used by the organization—that is, data elements that the organization processes and derives insights from. An infotype will be a piece of information with a singular meaning—“email address” or “street address,” for example, or even “salary amount.”

In order to refer to individual fields of information and drive a governance ...