Practitioner's Guide to Operationalizing Data Governance

CHAPTER 5Common Starting Points

RESULTS YOU CAN EXPECT WITH TOO MANY ENTRY POINTS

When organizations begin talking about Data Governance, it can quickly become a catch‐all for any data‐related issues. Trying to solve for every problem that may arise results in too many distractions and a lack of focus. Programs that take it all on at the beginning tend to fall apart not because of a willingness to improve but due to this lack of focus. Nothing is ever completed and stakeholders begin to wonder why they bother, and go back to their old workarounds.

BUILDING A DATA PORTFOLIO

You cannot begin Data Governance efforts with every data element in your data ecosystem in mind. So, how do you filter down to the most important data assets? A great place to start from that respect is with your reporting and analytic platform (regardless of whether you call it a Data Warehouse, Data Mart, Data Lake, Lakehouse, etc.) because that is where users interact with data and, coincidentally, find data issues.

The following is an example of a Business Data Portfolio. It is meant to represent the reporting and analytic capabilities required or desired by business stakeholders. The data subject areas at the top of the diagram logically reflect the data needed to support each of the capabilities with the understanding that data subject areas are used across multiple capabilities (Figure 5.1).