Data Governance is a big topic, right up there with regulatory compliance, data-based decision-making, and being a learning organization. For leadership, it sounds like an initiative, with committees, lots of meetings, and tons of paperwork. If an organization’s leaders don’t have a strong data background, they may find it hard to understand the value of investing time and money to improve data governance.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Data Governance. As awareness grows, many of our clients are generally feeling like they need to work on their data governance, and some are asking us if we can help. In response, I’ve decided to write a blog series about this mysterious new-to-many and important subject. In this series, I’ll describe what Data Governance is (this post) and why it’s important, and provide you with a framework for understanding and improving Data Governance in your organization, regardless of where you are on the Data Governance spectrum.

What’s in a word? Quite a lot, in fact. We may choose our words wisely, spit our words out, or leave our words unspoken. But for others to understand what we mean, we need to share a language. French, American Sign, and Egyptian hieroglyphics are examples of widely-recognized languages. Even street signs and traffic lights are a universal language.

I was introduced to the term data maturity by Karen Graham, Maddie Grant, and Jenn Taylor at their 2019 GoodTech Fest presentation. (If you dont know about GoodTech Fest, check out my blog post on it here and consider going in 2020! Its a great, reality-based conference about measuring what matters in the nonprofit sector.) Ive been thinking a lot about this idea of data maturity, and how we can help organizations build capacity to provide data for themselves and to funders.