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CHAPTER

Data governance artifacts

and tools

14

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.
dMark Twain

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
dMark Twain

This short chapter concerns itself with some of the more mechanical and discrete elements of data
governance. If you understand DG as a program, and implement it as such, sooner or later you are
going to find yourself up to your hips in documents and files representing the multitude of artifacts
being governed. Thus, it will be necessary to administer the governance program.
Talk to a corporate controller or a manager of documents in any large organization. The tracking
and maintenance of policies, rules, manuals, websites, and so on can be overwhelming and requires
some formal administration. After a short time, your DG program will be maintaining its own artifacts
but will also start to deal with the artifacts of all of the information management efforts. The best
examples of this are policies. In most organizations, you cannot swing the proverbial dead cat without
hitting a policy (and some of them are even followed!). In our experience, the potential for admin-
istrative issues can threaten the vitality of your DG effort.
During the research for this book, the author sat with a few vendors regarding the direction of
their DG administration tools. The research revealed a lot of good ideas, but not a lot of cohesive or
consistent terminology or approaches. That is a problem, since the one great constant request of the
varied consumers of information management tools and technologies has been some constancy
across products and vendors of standard definitions of policies, principles, rules, etc. So presenting
products and product features is confusing and impossible to keep up to date in a book like this.
Therefore, we are presenting a basic framework for what you need to track, and how to determine
what the mechanisms are to do the tracking. You may use some or all of the terms presented next.
Think of this chapter as a checklist for what you may want to manage your DG artifacts and how
to do it.
The content of this chapter is based solely on the experience of our DG practice. We are confident in
what is being said, but it is presented through our lens. We use our terms and definitions of DG
concepts, so review Chapter 2 if you need to at this point. The reader may also see a strong similarity
between the DG components to be administered and key information management artifacts. This is no
coincidence, as part of the role of DG is to govern the use and management of information
management artifacts.

Data Governance. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-415829-0.00014-9 167
Copyright Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.