Data governance capability mainly focuses on the people and processes associated with managing enterprise data, but can also involve building relevant systems necessary to govern enterprise data.

Here are some of the key areas of responsibility of the data governance function:

Data Ownership / Stewardship

This function assigns ownership / stewardship of data for resolving data quality and data integrity issues, data protection issues etc.

Data Acquisition Policies

This function is responsible to define, monitor and regulate various data acquisition policies, for both internal and external data sources, to ensure compliance, trust, accountability and cost aspects.

Data Exchange Policies

This function deals with policies regarding usage and exchange of data across the enterprise with various internal businesses on a need basis, while ensuring regulatory compliance, customer protection, data security etc.

Data Privacy

This function ensures confidentiality of data across the enterprise through strict governance policies and access controls.

Data Security

This function ensures that data is accessed by authorised users and is responsible for providing appropriate authorisations. They also ensure protection against possible thefts and misuse of data by applying modern predictive techniques.

Data Compliance

This function ensures that the collection, processing and use of personal identifiable data is done as per what is communicated to the person whose data is being acquired and used.

Data Quality

This function is responsible to monitor and manage the quality of data on an enterprise level by providing appropriate technology and processes.

Data Integrity

This function is responsible for auditing the data within the enterprise to ensure that it comes from trusted sources, it reflects the reality and is appropriately leveraged for various business objectives.

Master Data Management

This function is responsible for managing enterprise master data to ensure that it is consolidated, de-duplicated, current, real and rich.

Reference Data Management

This function is responsible to maintain the enterprise reference data to provide a consistent view of data across the enterprise.

Data Cataloging

This function is responsible to maintain the absolute definitions of data elements across the enterprise, and their hierarchies

Data Traceability

This function is responsible to maintain the audits of changes that occur to data over time, and also trace the roots of data to their source systems for purposes of compliance.

Data Lifecycle Management

This function is responsible to define data retention policies and data purging policies. Retaining data incurs cost, while some data is required to be purged for purposes of compliance.

Data Enablement

This function ensures that the available data assets are leveraged to their maximum potential in order to derive business gains by providing data awareness campaigns and user trainings.