Most companies would agree that today, data is the very lifeblood of their business. It is created, maintained and exchanged through the organisation from one end to the other as part of everyday business operations.

Yet for many, this invaluable asset is plagued with problems. For example, identifiers and data names are inconsistent across systems for the same data. Also subsets of the same data are often duplicated across systems, making it difficult to maintain and keep any changes to this data synchronised.

All of this is symptomatic of data that needs to be more robustly controlled and managed. The term given to managing this enterprise data problem is data governance; the subject of this paper.