A deeper understanding of being accountable

The third pillar of data governance is accountability. Accountability for data is established when the processes and track records for all actions that happen in the data ecosystem are clear. In other words, data is not accountable when no one has a clear idea of why and how things happen in your data ecosystem.

The word “clear” can be expanded to some of the aspects:

• Clear traceability
• Clear data ownership
• Data lineage
• Clear data quality process

Clear traceability

Clear traceability means that for whatever event or actions occur on the data, you have a clear view of who does what and when. This is crucially important for examples such as these: events when a table that contains sensitive data is created, a list of queries that take most of the BigQuery capacity in a day, or a user that costs the most queries in a month.

Please note that the main point of this aspect of data governance is...