What is data governance? There are several definitions of data governance available from various sources.

According to Wikipedia, “data governance is a data management concept concerning the capability that enables an organization to ensure that high data quality exists throughout the complete lifecycle of the data, and data controls are implemented that support business objectives”. The key concept is high quality over time.

The Data Management Body of Knowledge says: “Data Governance (DG) is defined as the exercise of authority and control (planning, monitoring, and enforcement) over the management of data assets.”

Mike Ferguson of Intelligent Business Strategies says “Data governance is the orchestration of people, processes, policies and technology to formally define, discover, assess, clean, integrate, and protect structured and unstructured data assets through their lifecycle to guarantee commonly understood, trusted and secure data throughout the enterprise.”

The key concepts here are the management of data through the entire data lifecycle to ensure high quality available secure data for the organization’s benefit.