Congratulations! By this step you have made the commitment to protect your most valuable data assets, identified key stakeholders, established regular discussions with these stakeholders, and identified the scope of your governance initiative.
Remember a key to success will be keeping this small, gathering senior level support, and celebrating frequent successes.
The governance model has several components; business elements, actions, metrics, agents.
In your stakeholder meetings you likely have discussed the scope of your initiative and through that discussion identified the key business elements that need governance. These should be the business’s most important or most used data. It is also likely to be the most confidential or most controversial. And for all of these reasons each line of business, business department, or analytic team probably has their own data store and their own data definitions for these (therein lies the problem that you are working to solve).
Next, you and your stakeholder group will define the actions or operations that will be used to align these business elements across the disparate teams, data stores, or reports and get a common definition and common method of handling this data. How will your group make decisions, process approvals, and reconcile differences?
It is critical at this step to be selective and pick the low hanging fruit and the items with the biggest bang for the buck. Don’t try to define actions that cover all situations or you will find yourself endlessly meeting and discussing to account for every possible scenario. I have seen many data governance initiative die at this point because teams cannot agree.
Next, we focus on metrics and the agents that will enforce the model you create.