Implementing Data Governance: A Step-By-Step Guide

Implementing an effective data governance strategy is crucial for organizations that strive to leverage their data efficiently and securely. Data governance ensures that data is accurate, accessible, protected, and compliant with relevant regulations.

However, establishing a robust governance framework can be challenging, particularly for organizations that deal with large volumes of complex information. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers robust data governance to simplify and accelerate governance processes, providing businesses with a user-friendly solution to implement best practices in data management.

This step-by-step guide outlines how to implement data governance within an organization and demonstrates how the platform can streamline processes.

Step 1: Define the Objectives of Data Governance

Before launching any tools or technologies, it’s essential to first define the key objectives of the organization’s data governance initiative. This will serve as the foundation for the overall strategy and ensure that all efforts align with the broader goals of the organization.

Key Considerations

• Data Quality: Ensure data is accurate, complete, and reliable.
• Data Security and Compliance: Implement controls to protect sensitive data and comply with data privacy laws such as GDPR or CCPA.
• Data Accessibility: Make sure that data is readily accessible to the right stakeholders.
• Data Stewardship: Assign ownership and accountability for data assets across the organization.

How the Actian Data Intelligence Platform Helps

The platform simplifies this step by offering a centralized solution that allows users to collaborate with various departments and define clear objectives for data governance. The platform’s intuitive interface enables stakeholders to contribute to the development of governance policies.

Step 2: Identify Data Stakeholders and Data Ownership

Next, identify the key stakeholders involved in the management and use of data within the organization. This typically includes data stewards, business users, IT teams, legal and compliance officers, and executives. Defining clear roles and responsibilities for data ownership ensures that accountability is distributed, and data governance policies are consistently enforced.

How the Platform Helps

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform makes it easy for an organization to assign ownership to data. This ensures clear accountability across departments and business units, making it easy to track who is responsible for which data assets. It also facilitates collaboration, allowing stakeholders and data stewards to easily communicate and contribute to governance efforts.

Step 3: Conduct a Data Inventory and Classification

Data inventory and classification are crucial steps for identifying and managing an organization’s data assets. This involves cataloging all available data assets and sources, understanding where the data resides, and classifying it based on its sensitivity, value, and usage.

How the Platform Helps

The platform simplifies this process by automatically discovering and cataloging data assets across the organization and showcasing them in easy-to-use displays powered by knowledge graph technology. The platform uses intelligent scanning algorithms to detect various data assets, ensuring that nothing is overlooked. Once the data is identified, the platform provides classification features that help prioritize security measures and streamline access control.

Step 4: Define Data Policies and Standards

After understanding an organization’s data landscape, decision makers need to define and implement policies and standards that govern data usage, security, and quality. These may include data access policies, data retention policies, and data security standards. Clear policies ensure that data is used responsibly and in compliance with applicable regulations throughout the organization.

How the Platform Helps

The platform allows businesses to create and enforce data governance policies with built-in compliance templates. It helps users define rules for data privacy, security, and usage, ensuring that these policies are applied consistently across all applicable data assets. The platform’s governance framework also allows users to set up data quality checks and automatically synchronizes with the organization’s existing data quality solutions, ensuring data remains clean and accurate over time.

Step 5: Implement Data Security and Privacy Controls

Data security and privacy are at the heart of any data governance initiative. Depending on the type of data being handled, organizations may need to implement encryption, access control, and monitoring measures to protect sensitive data. This includes ensuring compliance with relevant regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA, which govern personal and medical information.

How the Platform Helps

With robust security and privacy features, the platform helps safeguard sensitive data. Users can implement role-based access control (RBAC) to restrict access to sensitive data based on user roles. The platform also integrates with existing security tools to enhance monitoring and auditing capabilities. It supports automated compliance checks, allowing the organization to verify that its data governance policies meet the requirements of data privacy laws and industry regulations. It’s also SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliant.

Step 6: Enable Data Access and Collaboration

Data governance shouldn’t hinder the free flow of information within an organization. Instead, it should enable responsible access to data while maintaining security. It’s important to ensure that data can be easily accessed by authorized users and that collaboration between teams is facilitated.

How the Platform Helps

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is designed to enable collaboration across departments while maintaining strict governance controls. The platform acts as a single source of truth for all data assets, allowing users to search and discover relevant data quickly. Additionally, it supports collaboration tools that allow teams to annotate, share, and discuss data assets in a controlled environment, ensuring transparency and knowledge sharing.

Step 7: Monitor and Enforce Data Governance Policies

Data governance is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and enforcement. Regular audits, reviews, and updates to governance policies are necessary to adapt to new business needs, technological changes, and evolving compliance requirements.

How the Platform Helps

Powerful monitoring and reporting tools offered by the platform allow data owners to track data usage, security compliance, and policy enforcement. The platform’s audit trail features provide detailed logs of who accessed what data and when, helping to ensure accountability and transparency. Additionally, the platform can provide insights into potential gaps in the organization’s existing data governance strategy, allowing decision makers to make data-driven improvements and increase the effectiveness of their data governance framework.

Step 8: Educate and Train Employees

A successful data governance strategy requires buy-in and participation from all levels of the organization. Employees need to understand the importance of data governance, their role in maintaining data quality, and the consequences of non-compliance.

How the Platform Helps

Easy-to-understand documentation and tutorials explain how to leverage the platform to access, use, and protect data within the governance framework. By empowering employees with the right tools and knowledge, the platform fosters a culture of data responsibility throughout the organization. Equally as important, the platform is designed to be simple to use and displays information using knowledge graph technology, so using the platform is easy for even the most non-tech-savvy members of an organization.

Simplify Data Governance With Actian

Implementing data governance can be a complex and time-consuming process, but with the right strategy and tools, organizations can build a robust framework that ensures data is managed securely, responsibly, and efficiently. The data intelligence platform from Actian accelerates the implementation of data governance by offering an integrated solution for cataloging, classifying, securing, and managing data across the enterprise.

By streamlining and automating many of the steps involved in data governance, the platform allows organizations to focus on maximizing the value of their data while minimizing risk and ensuring compliance. Organizations can schedule a live demonstration to see the platform in action and find out firsthand how it can transform their data and support comprehensive governance.

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. Our data platform simplifies how people connect, manage, and analyze data across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. With decades of experience in data management and analytics, Actian delivers high-performance solutions that empower businesses to make data-driven decisions. Actian is recognized by leading analysts and has received industry awards for performance and innovation. Our teams share proven use cases at conferences (e.g., Strata Data) and contribute to open-source projects. On the Actian blog, we cover topics ranging from real-time data ingestion, data analytics, data governance, data management, data quality, data intelligence to AI-driven analytics.