Data Governance 101 — (part 2) How to catalog your data?

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

Thanks for coming back! We have quickly reviewed in my part 1 of this series, why do we need Data Governance?

Now, let’s dig into the first step. Cataloging the data you have.

Know what (data) you have and use. It is easy really (just kidding)! Just go and ask everyone what data they use, they will be like a deer in the headlights. The really time consuming and expensive portion of this process is not to collect it but to keep it up to date on a regular basis. That is where governance policies come in, we will talk about those in a later article.

We will get the basics out of the way, first.

There are 4 easy steps to follow in cataloging your enterprise data, at least there is a method to the madness.

1. Document your enterprise domain
2. Collect Business usage and terminologies
3. Collect Technical usage and terminologies
4. Assign ownership and accountability to each usage

Enterprise domain

Let’s take an example of Amazon.com, specifically, their book business.

Enterprise (data) domain is really breaking down at the highest level, what Amazon.com does. Amazon.com sells Books to Customers and…