Data Governance Agreements: Key to Sustainable Data Lineage Metadata

We have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for technology. Why not Data Governance Agreements (DGAs) for data and metadata?

The missing link between high-level management agreements and in-the-trenches metadata collection tactics, Data Governance Agreements can help organizations collect and maintain the data lineage metadata they need to accomplish many business goals. These valuable management tools help business groups agree on how to engage with each other for data issues and needs, how to establish and maintain ownership and stewardship of data and metadata, and how to set and meet expectations for collection of metadata needed for sourcing, lineage analysis, and impact analysis.

Attendees will learn:

• Typical structures for Data Governance Agreements
• Value statements for DGAs that will make Business Leaders want to sign them
• Data ownership, governance, and stewardship provisions to include in your DGA
• Metadata collection standards to reference in your DGA
• Metadata management processes to support the terms of your DGA
• Change Control practices to mandate in your DGA
• Arguments for making DGAs a part of any new warehouse sourcing or provisioning

Gwen Thomas is President of The Data Governance Institute, which provides publications, training, and consulting in the areas of data governance, stewardship, compliance, and data strategies.

Gwen has designed Data Governance programs or helped existing programs become more mature at companies such Washington Mutual, Russell Investments, Sallie Mae, NDCHealth/Wolters Kluwer, Wachovia Banks, Disney, and Coors. She has provided strategy and advice to many other public, private, and governmental organizations, often partnering with groups such as IBM and systems integrator CIBER, for whom she designed their Sarbanes-Oxley practice. She has worked with a series of large and mid-sized organizations to reduce risk in data integration, warehouse, metadata, web portals, master data, and content projects.

Publisher of www.DataGovernance.com, the web’s largest collection of vendor-neutral Data Governance information and humor, Gwen is a frequent presenter at industry data events and contributor to IT and business publications. She is also author of the book Alpha Males and Data Disasters: The Case for Data Governance.