A  Data Governance framework is comprised of the following parts;

• Oversight Board
• Stakeholder Forum
• Process Agents
• Business and Technical Liaisons
• A Repository
• Defined Focus Areas

Approaches that begin with spending money are doomed to failure, so start by building the portions that don’t require capital expenditures yet have real business impact.  The Stakeholder Forum is a perfect place to start for both of these reasons.

Stakeholders are the people, functional groups, and teams that depend on the data within the scope of your governance initiative.  To incubate this initiative, be sure to hand pick stakeholders that are already active in data.  Business analysts make excellent candidates because the quality of their reports and analytics are directly dependent on the data you are trying to govern.

Establish a roundtable with these stakeholders where you jointly identify the business needs and justification for a Data Governance function in your organization.  Next, define the role of Data Steward and leverage the Stewards to solve problems that arise with your data, such as conflicting data definitions.  Finally, establish some training, even if just simple documentation. 

Remember to start your Data Governance program by identifying the business’s most important or most used data.  Select a team of folks (such as business analysts) that use and depend upon this data and therefore have a vested interest.  Then leverage this team to create a Data Stakeholder forum and define needs, solutions, and training.