I started to write a blog page about Data Ownership, and pretty quickly I hit that point where I was spouting acronyms, abbreviations and other bits of jargon. So fast forward back to a blank page.
Data Governance. What does this mean? Why are we doing it?
It is a programme of work to identify all the critical data assets within an organisation, assign an owner to each and place the asset under a data management process
Great! So what does this mean, exactly? Let’s pick this apart further.
A data asset is a piece of data, such as an address or a customer. It can be a single, simple data field e.g. postcode of a customer’s home address or it can be a complex data item, for example a calculated value for, say cost inclusive of VAT
What is a data asset
In our original definition, we talked about ‘Critical Data Assets‘
Critical Data Assets are those that are central to a key business process or function. The process can’t really operate without them.
What is a Critical Data Asset
In short, most organisations are awash with data – think about all the systems: CRM, Billing, Product databases, etc… – whilst we’d like to get all the data managed, we need to tackle the important stuff as a priority. Being able to identify those data items that are central to the core business processes is key.
Full Metal Aardvark 