Businesses are operating in a technology-driven market, causing them to deal with a lot of data daily. Many companies struggle to turn this data into an asset and identify good and unusable data. If you are looking for a career in data governance, you are already interested in organising data for profit.
What is data governance?
The Data Governance Institute defines data governance as: “the exercise of decision-making and authority for data-related matters.”
Data governance defines who does what in data management by determining the activities that must be undertaken to manage data as an asset. Then identifying who in the business is responsible for which data management-related activity. And finally determining the accountabilities, responsibilities and decision rights of those people who are taking care of the data.
Why is data governance important?
The benefits of businesses having a clear data governance framework include the following:
- The speeding up of implementation times for projects
- Robust and sustainable improvements in data quality
- Increase in value of available data
What are some typical data governance jobs?
Implementing a data governance strategy in an organisation will create the need for some data governance experts, and these may include:
- Data Stewards – to support specific departments in their use of data. They may be business data stewards (responsible for measuring and reporting data quality in a data glossary) or technical data stewards (sometimes called data architects, responsible for the data model and lifecycle across IT systems)
- Data Owners – responsible for specifying the business requirements on data and data quality
- Data Operators – responsible for the creation and maintenance of data based on the defined standards
- Head of Data Management/ Chief Data Officer – responsible for defining data strategy, setting up data governance and managing data steward on a day-to-day basis
What skills and knowledge do you need to work in data governance?
If you are interested in a career in data governance, then you should have the following:
- A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Business Administration or Information Technology
- A proven track record of success in database development and administration
- Thorough experience in MS Office, including Excel, Powerpoint and Word
- Unix and Windows OS experience
- Good communication skills enable you to coordinate data and information between departments
- Great data analysis skills with knowledge of key analysis tools such as BusinessObjects, Dataflux and ROOT
- Knowledge of Big Data systems such as SQL and Hadoop
- Data migration tool knowledge
- Knowledge of external data regulations
As the business information and information technology worlds continue to collide, big data is where big money lies. This means that data governance roles will continue to increase in importance as they can help take the big data and utilise it in a way that best suits a company’s interests.
If you want to make sure you have the right data governance talent in place or are looking to become a Data Management Consultant or Data Steward, then please get in touch with one of our expert consultants at info@agilerecruit.com
