Page 59 - CITP Review

 Auditability. Data-related decisions, processes, and controls subject to data governance will be
auditable; they will be accompanied by documentation to support compliance-based and operational
auditing requirements.
 Accountability. Data governance will define accountabilities for cross-functional data-related
decisions, processes, and controls.
 Stewardship. Data governance will define accountabilities for stewardship activities that are the
responsibilities of individual contributors, as well as accountabilities for groups of data stewards.
 Checks and balances. Data governance will define accountabilities in a way that creates checks and
balances between business teams and technology teams, as well as between the creators and
collectors of information, managers of information, users of information, and providers of standards
and compliance requirements.
 Standardization. Data governance will introduce and support standardization of enterprise data.
 Change management. Data governance will support proactive and reactive change management
activities for reference data values and the structure and use of master data and metadata.

Strategy
There are many ways to create a data governance program that follows these objectives and basic
principles. Although any number of approaches might work, the following sections describe an optimal
8
strategy for data governance.

Define the business problem
The business problem that needs to be solved may be characterized as follows:

 Data scientist: “I spend too much time looking for definitions.”
 Chief financial officer: “I received two reports yesterday with different numbers for total sales last
month.”
 Chief information security officer: “We need a comprehensive repository of applications so that we
can apply information security protection.”
 Chief executive officer: “I asked for a report on the total number of customers; however, finance and
marketing gave me different numbers.”

Identify the business and executive sponsors

The business problem drives the executive sponsor for the data governance program. Sponsors for the
data governance may include the following roles:
 Vice president of marketing to increase customer cross-sell and upsell.
 Vice president of engineering to drive clean product data and consistent hierarchies.
 Vice president of human resources to ensure correct employee data during the onboarding process.
 Chief financial officer to improve the quality of vendor data to get the best payment terms.

Manage and classify the business terms

The starting point for most data governance programs is usually a glossary of business terms. Although
the starter glossary for many data governance teams is often an Excel file, this becomes unmanageable

8
See footnote 5.

© 2019 Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. All rights reserved. 2-13