Data governance and management activities give you broad oversight of your data assets, along with managing them to achieve certain goals such as making day to day decisions to improve quality and discoverability. It is an essential component of information governance.
The key to good data governance and management is the consistent application of standards, policies and procedures. It supports building interoperability across business, security, legal, semantic and technical themes in your interoperability projects.
It should be applied at the beginning and throughout each of the interoperability development phases.
Some key activities include:
- Metadata for interoperability
- Data indexing and discovery
- Taxonomy
- Open data and formats
- Data quality
- Data compliance and security
Before commencing any work on building your interoperability, you need to become familiar with how your agency governs its information and data. An information and data governance framework or similar can help you identify who is responsible for data governance and management standards for your agency.
Why data governance and management?
- ensure data has integrity and is available, usable, and secure
- conduct reviews and audits to identify what data needs to be interoperable based on their value and risk
- monitor information platforms, systems and applications for compatibility
- assess the risks of sharing (security, privacy, legal or other possible restrictions) and develop mitigation strategies or controls
- negotiate custody, ownership or shared access agreements
- negotiate the conditions on which information can be shared legally and ethically
- coordinate roles and responsibilities for stewardship, curation and maintenance of data.
Data disposal
Like all records, data is subject to legal requirements, standards and policies that determine its retention and disposal.
Data champion
A data champion is someone in your agency who is formally assigned rights and responsibilities to ensure data is being managed in line with relevant frameworks, policies and standards. This may be a Chief Data Officer or a Chief Information Governance Officer who assures:
- data quality is fit for purpose
- the agency has accountable, authoritative, single source of truth data
- data sharing agreements are established with trusted users and agencies
- data access requests are streamlined
- data risks are managed
- data stewards are appointed to valuable data sets.
Related links
- Chief information governance officer
- Compliant destruction of Australian Government records
- Disposing of information
- Information Management framework
- Information Management Standards
- Interoperability development phases
- Interoperability scenarios (PDF, 2.5MB)
- Legislation, policies, standards and advice
- Data management plan template (DOCX, 176kB)