What is data governance?

Data governance refers to the overall management and implementation of policies, procedures, and standards for ensuring the high quality, integrity, and security of data in an organization.

Data is a business asset and is owned by specific LOBs in an organization. The process of improving data is continuous as new data is constantly generated and utilized by businesses for their daily operations. The improvement of data is quantified by data owners and its impact is linked directly to business outcomes.

Along with the data improvement process, the privacy and security portion of the data is also a key responsibility of the data owners. As soon as the data is compromised or misused, it can lead to severe consequences for an organization, impacting its operations, reputation, and financial well-being.

The following figure highlights the high-level components of data governance. We will dive into more details as we unfold this topic in this chapter:

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