Data Governance

Data should be:

UNIVERSITY-OWNED: The Ohio State University is the owner of all university data assets. The organizational framework for delegating data management responsibilities throughout the enterprise should reflect distributed stewardship.

ACCESSIBLE: Data should be made accessible and data governance should be as least restrictive as possible while upholding privacy and security concerns and regulatory requirements. Data democratization means that there are no gatekeepers creating undue bottlenecks at the gateways to aggregate or de-identified data, but that sensitive data is protected by appropriate limited access.

MANAGED: University data is a valuable institutional asset and must be managed to comply with applicable federal and state laws and regulations and university policies, standards, and guidelines. It is everyone’s responsibility to ensure the accuracy, security, protection, and productive use of institutional data.

CONSISTENT: Data quality, accessibility, privacy, and security must be defined, communicated, and managed consistently across the data life cycle.

EFFICIENT: Data governance processes should be standardized and as automated as possible to keep current with changes in data and data processes.

FLEXIBLE: Processes and procedures should be regularly evaluated as data and university needs change over time.

Responsible for strategic guidance of the data governance program, prioritization for data governance projects and initiatives, and final arbiter for decisions that cannot be resolved at a lower level. The current Data Governance Council membership list and charter are available for reference (login required).

Senior executive responsible for data and domains within their organization who responds to high-level data issues such as a data breach.

Takes a strategic, cross-functional view of domain data for the benefit of the enterprise, promotes data governance within the unit's business processes, resolves intra-domain conflicts and escalates to the Data Governance Council when necessary, responsible for approving (or delegating the approval of) data access requests.

Responsible for issue resolution within the secondary domain and actively champions the implementation and enforcement of data governance within their functional areas of responsibility, resolves intra-domain conflicts where possible and escalates to the Primary Domain Steward.

Responsible for data quality audits and fixes as well as data quality triage and resolution, serves as the primary subject matter expert on unit data, facilitates development of metadata for data assets.

Responsible for defining, facilitating, supporting and sustaining data governance program activities with the goal of ensuring data is managed as an enterprise asset, tracks and reports success metrics to the Data Governance Council and stewardship stakeholders.

Data Governance is a framework of processes and tools that manage institutional data. More simply, it is about who has decision rights about data such as defining terms, approving access, and managing data quality to improve and protect Ohio State’s data assets.

Data domains are logical groupings of related data to provide a common structure in order to clearly define boundaries, interdependencies and stewardship areas of responsibility. Data domains consist of Primary Domains subdivided into Secondary Domains. The domain structure will continue to grow and expand to cover all data at Ohio State including the Wexner Medical Center. By design, Ohio State’s domain structure is not specifically tied to our organizational structure or to particular systems to minimize the impact of organizational or system changes.

A data steward is someone who has been assigned a formal role as an Operational Data Steward, Secondary Domain Steward or Primary Domain Steward. As part of their role, Data Stewards are designated university officials whose functional areas of responsibility include the creation or origination of institutional data. They have overall responsibility for managing and maintaining such data. Data stewards are the main point of contact for their respective data and how it should be used.

It is everyone’s role to take care of data, even if you have not formally been assigned a data stewardship role. We all have a part to play in the caretaking and safeguarding of data which we create or use in our jobs and roles.