What is Data Governance?
The framework of policies, processes, and standards that ensure data is accurate, secure, compliant, and consistently managed across an organization.
Definition
Data governance is the organizational discipline that defines who can access what data, how data quality is maintained, where data lives, and how it complies with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. It covers data ownership (who's responsible for each dataset), data quality standards (validation rules, deduplication processes), access controls (role-based permissions), data lineage (tracking where data came from and how it was transformed), and retention policies (how long data is kept and when it's deleted).
Why It Matters
Poor data governance leads to three expensive problems: compliance violations (GDPR fines can reach 4% of global revenue), bad decisions based on dirty data, and duplicated effort across teams working with different versions of the truth. As companies adopt more data tools and collect more customer information, governance becomes the difference between a data-driven organization and a data-chaotic one.
Example
A B2B company implements data governance by: designating Marketing Ops as the owner of lead data, requiring all tools to sync through a central CDP, creating deduplication rules that run nightly, setting 24-month retention limits on prospect data for GDPR compliance, and establishing a data dictionary that defines how "customer" and "prospect" are classified across Salesforce, HubSpot, and their data warehouse.