In the planning phase, you put a lot of thought into what policies and processes you need most and what you want them to look like. Now it’s time to put them to the test in the real world. That means subjecting all of your careful planning to the complex network of technical and social systems already operating in your organization and all of the contingencies therein.

A data catalog is one of the more accessible outputs of a data governance project. It is valuable to anyone in your organization who needs data and likes to spend as little time tracking it down as possible. Developing a data catalog can also be something of a diplomatic mission, resulting in a resource that will save your coworkers’ time and demonstrate some of the benefits of good data governance.

The work of defining and implementing policies and processes could be a book all on its own. Often, organizations we work with are overwhelmed or confused about ”policies and processes”. So in this blog post we will talk about some common categories for organizing your thoughts about data governance policies and processes, and provide some examples to get you thinking about where you might start.

This means data solutions are people solutions, too! Data governance can be divided into three components: people, processes, and technology. In this post, we’ll talk about people. They’re the non-technical, ever-present, and most important component of anything you do with data. As usual.

Data Governance is a big topic, right up there with regulatory compliance, data-based decision-making, and being a learning organization. For leadership, it sounds like an initiative, with committees, lots of meetings, and tons of paperwork. If an organization’s leaders don’t have a strong data background, they may find it hard to understand the value of investing time and money to improve data governance.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Data Governance. As awareness grows, many of our clients are generally feeling like they need to work on their data governance, and some are asking us if we can help. In response, I’ve decided to write a blog series about this mysterious new-to-many and important subject. In this series, I’ll describe what Data Governance is (this post) and why it’s important, and provide you with a framework for understanding and improving Data Governance in your organization, regardless of where you are on the Data Governance spectrum.

What’s in a word? Quite a lot, in fact. We may choose our words wisely, spit our words out, or leave our words unspoken. But for others to understand what we mean, we need to share a language. French, American Sign, and Egyptian hieroglyphics are examples of widely-recognized languages. Even street signs and traffic lights are a universal language.

I was introduced to the term data maturity by Karen Graham, Maddie Grant, and Jenn Taylor at their 2019 GoodTech Fest presentation. (If you dont know about GoodTech Fest, check out my blog post on it here and consider going in 2020! Its a great, reality-based conference about measuring what matters in the nonprofit sector.) Ive been thinking a lot about this idea of data maturity, and how we can help organizations build capacity to provide data for themselves and to funders.