From my last blog we have learned about some of the roles and responsibilities that should play within Mindful Data Governance, now we need to identify the data domains. Before we can start to look at formalizing the nonstandard data governance practices that are going on within your business today we need to identify the different data domains. Simply put all you are doing is identifying the systems (transactional) that are collecting data about the business and the consumers. For example data domains could be referencing product, consumer, vendors, finance, hr and logistic information.

Looking at the above example each of these data domains can contain:

  • Data owners
  • Business glossaries
  • Data dictionaries
  • Business processes
  • Data catalogs
  • Reports catalogs
  • Data quality scorecards
  • Systems and applications
  • Policies and standards

The best way to start to identify data domains is simply start looking at the business needs or problems. For example lets say that a Client has need to be able to increase customer experience, to be able to up-sell while a customer is buying a different product, and to control over validating customer’s needs.

Requirements such as these, were tied to the business problem our client was facing: they had to control visibility and understanding around its customers. Data was spread across multiple systems and applications with no defined ownership. We helped create ownership by identifying key stakeholders, business processes, and datasets related to the customer domain and established control around its lifecycle. The idea is to have a clear understanding of where data comes from, who owns it, and when changes are made, who should be involved.

Remember when implementing the Mindful Data Governance Initiative you do not have to implement all the data domains at once, in fact I highly suggest that you do not do that. Assign a number to your data domains in the order that the business would like those data domains to be implemented and then follow that. Mindful data governance is about implementing data governance in phases and not to create a disturbance in your business. Mindful Data Governance will increase your data quality, accessibility, usability, security and availability.

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