What Is Data Governance? Understanding the Business Impact

Chapter 3. Maturing Your Data Governance Program

Good data governance doesn’t happen overnight.

In order to succeed, your data governance program must be well planned, with a clear understanding of its impact on every part of the business. It must be carefully deployed, without skipping any steps. What’s more, it must also align closely with the needs, goals, values, and context of the business so that objectives are clear and reachable.

Once you’ve deployed it, your data governance program still needs to mature. You’ll have to make adjustments, correct misalignments, and learn to adapt to changes as they come. As your employees continue to work within the new system, they’ll develop habits, as you learned in Chapter 1; it’s up to you to ensure that the habits they develop are good ones. They’ll also learn how it all works, becoming more confident and knowledgeable and developing new processes that deepen efficiency and minimize room for error. As your company culture changes to incorporate a strong and healthy data culture, this knowledge and confidence reinforces itself and spreads through the organization. That, in broad strokes, is what it means for a data governance program to mature. We can define data governance maturity as the development and deployment status of the data governance processes, functions, principles, and standards necessary for a company to use data as an asset successfully.

Data Governance Maturity Models

Any parent of a teenager can tell you that maturity ...