Data governance
On this page 9 topics
Overview
Topics
- Ownership
- quality
- lineage
- access policies
Learn first
2.5 h of practice (estimate)
Learning outcomes
- Define data ownership and stewardship roles for a solution.
- Specify data quality rules and how they are measured and reported.
- Capture lineage from source to report.
- Design access policies for data consumers, including analytics.
Lessons
Lab and exercises
Lab
ARC-030-LAB1 · Larkspur data governance
Outcomes: 1–4 · Time: ~2.5 h
- Name owners and stewards for the key data sets (products, prices, customers, orders, stock, payments, sales).
- Write ten data quality rules with dimension, measure, threshold, owner, and reporting place.
- Draw lineage for the daily sales report from till and web order to board report.
- Write analytics access policies by role and data class, including masking.
- Review with a role-played head of finance and data owner.
Acceptance: lineage complete from till and web order to board report.
Exercises (case-based; six exercises)
| ID | Outcome | Task |
|---|---|---|
| ARC-030-EX01 | 1 | Larkspur has a governance committee but nobody can say who owns customer addresses. Propose the ownership model for the customer data set. |
| ARC-030-EX02 | 1 | Separate the roles of owner, steward, and custodian for the product price list and give an example decision for each. |
| ARC-030-EX03 | 2 | Write five quality rules for stock levels with measure and threshold. |
| ARC-030-EX04 | 2 | A quality dashboard exists but nobody acts on it. Redesign how breaches are reported and handled. |
| ARC-030-EX05 | 3 | Draw lineage for "returns rate by store" from till to report and mark where a defect would most likely enter. |
| ARC-030-EX06 | 4 | A marketing analyst asks for the full customer table. Write the access decision and the policy for analytics consumers. |
Show solutions
- EX01 Owner: head of customer service or CRM business lead, accountable for rules; stewards per channel; custodians are the CRM and platform teams; system of record named; decisions logged.
- EX02 Owner decides price rules and approvals; steward maintains price lists and fixes errors; custodian (ERP team) runs the system and backups.
- EX03 Examples: no negative stock; every SKU has a location; stock count updated within 15 minutes for store scans (timeliness); stock difference between platform and ERP under 0.5 percent; no duplicate SKU-location rows. Thresholds are examples to agree with the owner.
- EX04 Add owner and threshold per rule, alerts to steward, ticketing with deadline, weekly review, escalation to owner; track trend and closure.
- EX05 Till sale → platform return event → ERP posting → warehouse fact → report; defects often enter at return reason mapping and store code mismatch between systems.
- EX06 Give a pseudonymized, minimal view (segment, region, purchase categories) approved by the data owner; no direct identifiers; access logged; request a new approval for anything more.
Workplace evidence: a data quality or lineage improvement you led.
Quiz
Outcomes: O1 ownership and stewardship · O2 data quality rules · O3 lineage · O4 access policies for consumers.
A self-check for you: nothing is graded, saved or sent anywhere. Choose an answer, then check it. You can try again as often as you like.
Practical part
Governance plan review of the lab artifacts plus exercises ARC-030-EX01 to EX06. Pass: quiz at least 8/10, at least five of six exercises correct, and a lab with complete lineage from till and web order to board report.
Common mistakes
Governance committees without data owners; quality rules nobody measures.
Assessment
Governance plan review.
Workplace evidence
A data quality or lineage improvement you led.
Career relevance
Governance makes the data architecture trustworthy.