Page 49 -

28 CHAPTER 3 Overview of a data governance program

your DG program should be part of your everyday activity. This may take a very long time. Think about it more as
a goal rather than a requirement.
Again, think about financial controls. Few organizations talk about the financial governance program and
whether it should be justified to continue or be terminated. That would be unheard of. This perception is what you
are striving for with DG.

Regardless of the size of the organization or the complexity of DG, it is key to remember the DG
organization is not there to do information management. It is there to guide and monitor. Figure 3-3
takes the V we introduced and shows a typical assignment of roles on the DG side.
The key aspect about understanding the DG organization is that it is a formal definition of roles for
assigning responsibility and accountability for managing information assets.

Principles

We touched on principles earlier by way of a definition. In summary, they are general adopted rules that
guide conduct and application of data philosophy. Principles are more than just a term to be understood,
however. Principles are crucial elements in DG. One client told us they justified the entire program
because with principles in place, there were fewer meetings. Principles will succeed where a batch of
rules and policies will not. They are foundational. One explanation we use when confronted with
resistance to developing principles is to draw an analogy to the “Bill of Rights,” the first ten

,

FIGURE 3-3
The “V” with layers of DG.