Items for your Data Governance team

In order to maintain a healthy data governance team, they need to tackle the tough questions pertaining to your data security, data quality and protocols.    Lets look at some of the questions to address.

1.  How much reporting if any will happen on your source system?  Remember once you give access to the source system, it will be difficult to pry people away from that data because its "real time" 

2.  Will you allow SQL queries on your source system or just canned reports?  What about your data warehouse or ODS?  SQL queries or canned reports?

3. That begs another question.   How often will you update the warehouse with source system data.  IE. How current is your warehouse data?  Noon and close of business?  Just close of business?  

4.  When will you allow people to export data from your data warehouse?  Not times of day but will you allow your data to be exported to another system?   Remember once your data leaves your warehouse, you have just opened up another can of worms.   Your data warehouse team has just become the middle man in the equation and now you are fielding questions from a third party.  Everything from "I didn't receive all of my data" to "customer 999 is not in the data feed."

5.  How will my organization communicate changes to source system data?  For example, if I add a field to the source system, when will the data warehouse team find out about that change?  If that happens, how will it affect other system downstream from the data warehouse/ODS.?

6.  Which tools will you allow to hit the data warehouse?    Will they have table access using Tableau or will a team build Cognos/Microstrategy reports and feed them to the business to consume.

I hope that these questions have stimulated you to think about your data and placing a framework around that data to ensure data quality and integrity.