There is no standard approach to creating a data governance policy. Each data governance policy should be fashioned with a specific company and its needs in mind. Input from every stakeholder is not only preferable but necessary.
Nicola Askham, a data governance coach, advises that a good data governance policy has to have buy-in from everyone or it will fail. She wrote this article from Information and Data Manager:
As with all things data governance, I don’t think that there is such a thing as a standard approach, and there certainly is not one for a data governance policy. If there is no such thing as a standard data governance framework, why would you think that a policy written for another organization would work for you?
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t realize this and I’m often asked if I would share a template, or an example for data governance policy that they can copy.
For a policy to be really useful (i.e. help you implement Data Governance successfully) it needs to be written with your organisation in mind, and consider the following:
· What is the scope of your data governance programme?
· What is it that your organization is going to do to manage its data better?
· What roles and responsibilities are you going to have to manage your data better?
· What kind of processes are you going to implement as a result of having data governance?[…]
Assemble key senior stakeholders in a room together and get them to tell you what principles they want included in the policy. What are the high-level things that you want to achieve by having a data governance framework and policy in place? This could be things like “all data has a data owner”, or it could be describing which data will have data quality standards and monitoring in place, or which data will have definitions in your data glossary.
