Practitioner's Guide to Operationalizing Data Governance

CHAPTER 8Roles and Responsibilities

RESULTS YOU CAN EXPECT WHEN ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES ARE NOT CLEARLY DEFINED

In Chapter 7, “Organizational Framework,” I wrote about the importance of designing the organizational framework and providing definition around each of the decision‐making bodies in the framework. That activity is not meant to take the place of defining detailed roles and responsibilities. If you skip this step, the participants will not have clear direction on the tasks they need to do, decisions they need to make, or oversight they need to provide. The end‐result of not knowing is chaos, which means that skipping this step dooms your program.

ALIGNING ACTIONS AND DECISIONS TO PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

Defining key activities and decisions is the first step to detailed roles and responsibilities. This step is best taken without considering who is going to do the work. How do you determine the types of activities or decisions? Start with your objectives. I like to organize objectives by Data Management capabilities (Data Architecture, Metadata, Data Quality, Data Administration, Reporting & Analytics, Reference & Master Data, Data Security, and Data Life Cycle) and Data Governance program functions (Strategy & Alignment, Establish Data Governance Program, and Data Governance Operations). Table 8.1 shows the sample objectives we defined earlier grouped by the Data Management ...