Summary

In this chapter, we looked at what data governance is and discussed why the effective governance of data is critical. This is particularly important when we look at how we handle our data and manage the risks associated with that. But data governance is more than managing risk, and when done well can help promote a data-driven culture in your organization.

We then looked at how, with data contracts, we can embed our data governance alongside the data. This ensures the classifications and other metadata are correct, accurate, and kept up to date as the data evolves. That metadata can also be used to drive tooling and services to support the effective management and handling of our data, ideally by automating a lot of it away.

With that in place, we’re able to assign the responsibility of data governance to the data generators. They are the best placed to carry out that task, as only they have the full context of the data, what it contains, and why we are generating...