Source: [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/data-governance-ask-gerardus-blokdyk/)  
Author: [Gerardus Blokdyk](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardblokdijk/)  
Publication date: March 16, 2022
Retrieved from on March 16, 2022

Relevant ISO 27001 clauses/controls:


## Data Governance: Ask This;
1. Does your organization have a documented information or data governance program that is used across the enterprise?

2. Does your organization have data governance guidelines in place to ensure ongoing data integrity?

3. Does your organization have an established data governance body with well defined roles and responsibilities to support data governance activities?

4. Are data quality risks considered as a priority to your organization and have you cascaded risks to your data governance operational frameworks to reflect priorities?

5. Does your chief privacy officer have the skill sets and authority to coordinate privacy and data governance efforts across your organization and impact client experience?

6. Does your organization have a data governance program in place that meets the demands of the GDPR?

7. Are the data definitions, option sets, and business rules for the new data element consistent with the requirements previously established with organization staff and data governance groups?

8. What formal or informal data governance processes do you have in place to ensure that spatial and business data are available across your organization?

9. Do you have data governance processes in place for preventing poor quality data from entering the system for all of your sources?

10. Which data governance tasks has your organization deployed for the protection of information assets in the file sharing and collaboration environment?

11. Do you have a plan in place to ensure adoption of data governance and new ways of working across your organization?

12. How do you organize a platform of data and information that makes organization wide governance possible?

13. Do you have full leadership commitment to programs that ensure data governance including security and appropriate, legal, and ethical uses of data?

14. What awareness is there of data governance enabling capabilities that have been purchased or developed?

15. How does information management maturity play a role in data governance and governance activities as a whole?

16. Is data governance and quality a small part of the job for many people across your organization who are the closest to the data and understand it in the context of the business?

17. How do data management professionals meet challenges and take full inventory of an enterprise data environment to deliver on data governance initiatives and maximize information utilization?

18. Are data management and quality control being executed according to the information governance framework?

19. How do you ensure that data rules meet corporate governance and security standards to protect against the risk of IP theft?

20. What benefits did your organization achieve as a result of implementing data governance and MDM?

21. Has a data governance and management process been created that supports value based care use case development?

22. What inherent risks exist for your organization considering using a particular chain with regard to data governance and compliance?

23. How does the platform support granular security and data governance when data is queried in bi tools?

24. Does your organization dedicate a full time individual to oversee data governance and data management?

25. How clear is the companies data governance initiatives and who in your organization is involved?

26. Which data management practices can best support your organizations data governance policies?

27. What data governance policies will need to be in place for classifying data; defining its relevance; and storing, analyzing, and accessing it?

28. Are you part of a regulated industry or are there professional data standards that will make compliance and data governance your highest priority?

29. Does the description of the data governance system provide sufficient background to the requirements for achieving an enabling environment?

30. How do you ensure data governance and security at each stage of the data management including ingestion, storage, preparation and ongoing analysis?

31. How do you make privacy and data governance a competitive business advantage?

32. How easy to understand is your organizations data governance strategy in support of the data warehouse?

33. How does the board consider and agree on data governance priorities and policies for your organization?

34. How will data governance ensure that ethical concerns are considered, heard, and addressed throughout each project?

35. How do data governance and control factor into your organizations cloud decision making process?

36. How can information governance capabilities transform your readiness, providing a framework for personal data management?

37. What governance structure is in place to define data requirements for accuracy, timeliness, and completeness?

38. Do your analytic tools enable the seamless integration of data governance polices, while allowing for sensitive personal information to be anonymized and protected?

39. Are you defining and automating master data governance in relation to your business processes?

40. Does the repository have appropriate expertise to address technical data and metadata quality and ensure that sufficient information is available for end users to make quality related evaluations?

41. Do data governance policies and processes make visibility simpler, easier, and more accessible throughout the enterprise?

42. What data governance policies need to be in place for classifying, storing, analyzing, and accessing data?

43. Is your IT strategy aligned to the business strategy and governed by an IT/data governance steering committee?

44. How do you design tomorrows data governance to maximize business agility?

45. Does an implementation plan need to include the selection and implementation of a data governance group?

46. How do you define policies that support specific data governance needs at your organization?

47. How do you improve the data quality and data governance processes?

48. Does your data governance plan include policies that can help you safely harness new innovations and data sources?

  

## Organized by Key Themes: DATA, MANAGEMENT, ARCHITECTURE, PROCESS, SECURITY, LEAD, TEST, SYSTEM, LEARNING, GOVERNANCE:

  

### DATA:

  

Have data quality best practices been defined and adopted as official organizational data policies?

Safeguard that your team partners with the data governance and quality operations teams to identify and define new business terms and key performance indications (KPI) relevant to the business group or functional area. 

  

Is the requested data for a project that supports the goals and mission of your organization and benefits your clients?

Partner with Data governance team to develop a framework for Data Quality Management which includes data quality thresholds and rules, data quality assessment, data quality issues resolution, data monitoring and control that supports business needs. 

  

How do you secure the future support and availability of technical competencies for your solution?

Secure that your organization partners with the enterprise data governance team to ensure solution adhere to the organizations data principles and guidelines Support in development of a comprehensive credit data warehouse/infrastructure. 

  

How are you monitoring your assets performance throughout its life cycle and mitigating associated risks?

Be certain that your group is involved in data governance and management processes and applications, including process mapping, metadata, data quality monitoring, and data lineage tool sets. 

  

Will management provide financial and organizational support for the program over the long term?

Make sure the Manager, Data Governance works multi functionally to support master data efforts across the enterprise by serving as an expert in master data management and related business processes. 

  

How effective are the supporting departments in anticipating potential issues or decision points?

Make headway so that your staff is responsible for supporting and assisting in establishing the vision and execution of the system data and analytics data governance strategy by researching and documenting data policies and standards, developing and populating metadata artifacts, maturing data quality initiatives, and supporting the activation of data stewardship. 

  

Why have platforms become the dominant mode of organization and imagination in the digital society?

Confirm that your process is responsible for developing strategies, governance, architectures, and technologies that support modern, cloud-based, foundational, data management and data analytic, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities and ensures a holistic, enterprise approach is taken that enables the FDIC and IT organization to become more agile, innovative, and responsive to business needs. 

  

How does the decoupling scenario for production orders in combination with a product cost collector work?

Make headway so that your workforce collaborates with partners across your organization in developing and maintaining the data governance and data quality structures ensuring a balance among business need, quality, risk, and cost. 

  

Does your roadmap plan allow for alternative approaches to instantiating the big data environment?

Partner with key stakeholders to develop, communicate, and own a unified strategy and business plan articulating the expected business outcomes and required inclusive of an execution roadmap (near and long term), enterprise data governance strategy, data security, advanced AI strategies and data integration. 

  

Do you monitor and quantify the types, volumes, and impacts on all information security incidents?

Collaborate on the development of a long term enterprise data governance implementation roadmap to ensure continued delivery of business value. 

  

### MANAGEMENT:

  

Do you know what are the data liability risks and what are the data accountability and ownership practices?

Liaison so that your organization is involved in data management and data governance practices and processes at scale. 

  

Who are the people, advisors and stakeholders involved in the value proposition and its maintenance?

Secure that your staff is involved in data governance and Metadata management tools. 

  

Is it developing and maintaining constructive relationships with customers, vendors and others?

Establish that your process is developing and implementing a data governance model for digital data management. 

  

What is the benefit of getting involved for each of the intended organizations or individuals?

Make headway so that your group is involved in Data Management and Data Governance. 

  

How do you control, manage, and source big data and big data infrastructure services?

Lead data management and analysis to produce procurement and supply chain key performance indicators. 

  

How do you confirm that data has been sourced according to best practices?

Warrant that your staff is understanding and promoting data governance, data reuse and good data management practices. 

  

Are your research and development activities focused on meeting emerging client requirements?

Develop experience maturing and managing a Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB). 

  

What is the path forward to improve month end financial consolidation and management reporting?

Ensure strong data management skills to develop appropriate analytics and reporting. 

  

What are the stakeholders different motivations for being involved in or opposing the project?

Make headway so that your process is involved in leading strategy development and Project management with priority. 

  

How do you know if changes to your policies, procedures or protocols have improved patient outcomes?

Produce expected results locally in line with Corporate standards through improved processes, visibility to performance, data governance, and exception management. 

  

### ARCHITECTURE:

  

Has a data governance and management process been created that supports value based care use case development?

Make sure the data architect should support identifying and capturing the different data security classification and related access controls and ensure that architecture supports compliance with (internal) customer and regulatory data governance and protection policies like GDPR. 

  

What benefits did your organization achieve as a result of implementing data governance and MDM?

Be sure your staff is creating alignment to achieve process driven end to end business architecture. 

  

How will you manage the data, access and regulatory requirements associated with the automation program?

Manage integration of solution(s) into enterprise technical architecture and business environment. 

  

How to deal with governance challenges related to procurement, contracting, supervision, transparency, corruption, where several actors are involved?

Make headway so that your design is involved in architecture practice and methodologies. 

  

What technical architectural strategies do you use over time to maximize scalability, availability and throughput while reducing and / or minimizing infrastructure costs?

Utilize cost/benefit models with mapping architecture to business KPIs. 

  

How do you use data in your work?

Assure your process follows architecture standards. 

  

Are meetings effectively focusing key decision makers on problem solving, and are formats efficient?

Assure your staff is creating connectivity architecture using MuleSoft API. 

  

How do you maintain data governance?

Establish and maintain architecture standards, processes and constraints across your organization. 

  

Should the em have more granularity and refinement of business rules that your organization currently requires?

Work with Principal Development Consultants to refine development and architecture skills. 

  

Is your IT strategy aligned to the business strategy and governed by an IT/data governance steering committee?

Ensure you are able to converse work with architecture/technical teams to steer direction/solutions. 

  

### PROCESS:

  

How clear is the companies data governance initiatives and who in your organization is involved?

Be confident that your staff is involved in data governance processes for data development. 

  

Is there a single point of contact or a workflow for ensuring data accuracy and completeness?

Develop experience ensuring data quality and implementing data governance processes. 

  

What capacity do the people available to support the assessment have in terms of time and technical skills?

Safeguard that your team conducts process analysis and performance reporting in support of internal (internal) client needs. 

  

What methodological approach should be used for analysing and designing data governance systems?

Ensure your staff is involved in documenting processes, developing training materials deliver approach and business case. 

  

Are tools only acquired after requirements have been analyzed, or are major purchases sometimes made to use up year end money?

Oversee that your staff has end to end business process thinking. 

  

How do you support the effective deployment of innovative data based technologies in infrastructure?

Support definition and utilization of IT governance processes and policies. 

  

How do you evaluate if clinical handover processes are effective or improving?

Evaluate business gaps and process requirements for users/functions. 

  

How do you protect personal data from inappropriate access by privileged user credentials as system administrators?

Make sure your process contributes your organization or process perspective during design reviews. 

  

Is the cloud providers privacy policy consistent with your organizations business requirements?

Guarantee your staff is responsible for partnering with key stakeholders and driving process compliance. 

  

How do you find the right vision and roadmap to use information to a competitive advantage and support enterprise goals?

Secure that your workforce develops processes to support system wide initiatives and key operational areas. 

  

### SECURITY:

  

How do you enable appropriate access to data for your employees and partners, yet protect against threats?

Partner with technology, security, privacy, and business teams on the enterprise strategy for data governance. 

  

Do you need to appoint a dedicated lead to coordinate and drive your smart organization initiatives?

Plan to create synergies and drive the data governance program with business, security and technical teams. 

  

Which data management practices can best support your organizations data governance policies?

Invest in the execution of the Information Security Program, Data Governance practices, and Privacy assurance. 

  

How developed is the toolset that supports data governance activities and how consistently is that toolset utilized?

Support Security Team in investigations. 

  

Are users made aware of the responsibilities for maintaining a safe and secure working environment?

Ensure your workforce upgrades system by implementing and maintaining security controls. 

  

Do you have sustainable processes and technology to ensure proper data governance, including line of business data access, data privacy, security and compliance?

Verify that your process determines security violations and inefficiencies by conducting periodic audits. 

  

How do you decide how leadership roles are filled?

Oversee and lead the implementation of all security solutions. 

  

How do you find the right vision and roadmap to use information to a competitive advantage and support enterprise goals?

Coordinate and support cybersecurity assessments by external firms. 

  

What type, frequency, content will reports to data users, sponsors and partner organizations take?

Report any breaches in information security or policies. 

  

How do you keep track as the data comes in?

Identify security issues and track to closure. 

  

### LEAD:

  

Have there been points at which your frequency or type of contributions changed significantly?

Lead and advocates for the building and maintaining data governance, including governance bodies, taxonomy, data quality, and measurement, risk assessment, leading change, and stewardship networks, across the enterprise. 

  

How do you collect data on a regular basis?

Check that your team partners with business leaders on workforce planning and organizational design efforts. 

  

What tools and technologies does your organization use to enable data governance and management?

Make headway so that your workforce has leadership in executing plans successfully that enable business capabilities or business priorities. 

  

What etl tools are in use to manage the transfer of data from sources to the data storage layer?

Be certain that your group works with business leads to define and manage operational readiness. 

  

How do you securely share information and communicate effectively to move your mission forward?

Develop experience working effectively with business teams and leaders. 

  

How do you monitor the workflow?

Develop experience leading re organization and uniting teams to work collaboratively. 

  

How does large scale social production coordinate individual behavior to produce public goods?

Ensure strong leadership skills with involvement managing people in complex business environment. 

  

How do you find the requirements?

Make sure there is involvement in building productive working relationships with functional and/or business leaders. 

  

How are your organizations cyber risks communicated to the board, by whom, and with what frequency?

Collaborate with leadership across various disciplines, provide guidance, direction, or recommendations to address a wide range of business needs with an emphasis on optimized, timely and successful delivery. 

  

Does your employer provide you with the opportunity to work flexibly to any significant level?

Lead and provide technical guidance and mentorship to other team members. 

  

### TEST:

  

How does your organization believe the implementation of large IT projects should be evaluated?

Test and monitor data governance controls and procedures to evaluate the ongoing effectiveness of the privacy program. 

  

Do you have well defined data governance including dedicated roles with tested resources, policies, procedures and monitoring?

Execute test plans to ensure quality delivery using test code and unit tests. 

  

Are data governance groups involved with determining the processes for collecting the new data?

Ensure your company is involved in implementing Unit Testing. 

  

How do you decide what data your governance program should address?

Check that your design is preparing and maintaining diagrams, test plans and user guides. 

  

How do you optimize your IT operating model to deliver the required business capabilities?

Liaison so that your process verifies that all requirements are testable and generates testing objectives. 

  

Does the description of the data governance system provide sufficient background to the requirements for achieving an enabling environment?

Work with the QA team so they can provide regression testing of the solution. 

  

Do you understand your data landscape, your most important data initiatives and how to overcome challenges and meet objectives?

Respond promptly to requests from Validation/Test team for documentation or bug fixes. 

  

Are there any standardised data quality reports or expressions that can be associated with data either directly in database, or as part of metadata?

Guarantee your strategy writes programs, appropriate test artifacts, ad hoc queries, and reports. 

  

Can a penetration test of the service be performed to ensure that it has been securely deployed?

Make headway so that your company executes test scripts/cases and monitors testing results. 

  

How do you interpret data for other stakeholders?

Ensure your workforce works with the Analysts to interpret testing needs as requirements are being developed. 

  

### SYSTEM:

  

How do you optimize the performance of your building systems?

Ensure your company is involved in data governance, data architecture, data flow and system architecture to optimize the same. 

  

Who is responsible for addressing biennial review findings and tracking improvement activities?

Review business and technical requirements against system capabilities. 

  

How do you ensure that data rules meet corporate governance and security standards to protect against the risk of IP theft?

Make sure your design ensures that system and related processes meet all applicable compliance requirements. 

  

Does the solution track, audit, and report on the changes that impact file systems without native auditing enabled?

Safeguard that your organization maintains technical system documentation, including documentation of technical changes to the system. 

  

How do you further reinforce a data driven culture via ongoing releases for key capabilities?

Check that your team is conducting UAT (User Acceptance Testing) for various system releases. 

  

Is the data system/process supporting easy discoverability of the data to all relevant parties/stakeholders?

Certify your operation develops and maintains documentation supporting system and board configurations. 

  

What are cities doing to build more transparency, accountability and trust in the smart organization agenda?

Certify your company improve the work system and current ways of doing things. 

  

How do you identify structured data collections?

Proactively works with stakeholders to identify future system opportunities and enhancements. 

  

Do you have anti malware programs installed on all systems which support your cloud service offerings?

Be sure your workforce determines system access rights and secure information. 

  

Should there be limits on certain customer data types, collection approaches and uses by businesses?

Be sure your group understands and assesses issues by utilizing a systemic thinking approach. 

  

### LEARNING:

  

How do you develop, test and deploy analytical models promising to generate business value?

Develop experience working with Learning and Development data problems. 

  

How do you inform staff about information/Data Management decisions?

Liaison so that your company is learning organization and governance design. 

  

How do you determine and measure the outcomes and benefits from improved data governance?

Be confident that your organization is learning Point of Contact (POC) for a line of business supported by GO. 

  

Which methods allow a customer to assign plan costs more accurately to the different activity types per cost center?

Certify your strategy develops and implements curricula and learning paths for management and employee development. 

  

Have you determined which applications should move into the big data infrastructure platform?

Safeguard that your team is learning Strategy Operations Manager. 

  

How do you find the right vision and roadmap to use information to a competitive advantage and support enterprise goals?

Oversee that your design is learning transformation strategy and roadmap development. 

  

How do you justify the cost of implementing a mobile solution in your organization?

Establish that your team is learning Curation Strategy and Execution. 

  

How do you monitor data movement and comply with appropriate governance regulations?

Be sure your team is facilitating learning and development through individual and team coaching. 

  

What is the greatest challenge you have encountered/expect to encounter when trying to govern big data?

Establish that your operation administers the electronic Learning Management and Training Management request system. 

  

How do customer relationship management systems help organizations achieve customer intimacy?

Create a learning organization to help staff achieve the highest potential. 

  

### GOVERNANCE:

  

Will source data be available day one of the project to be modeled and prepped from conversion?

Interface so that your design develops business case and ROI for implementing information governance enterprise wide. 

  

How do the strategic factors of implementing cloud align with a product master data strategy?

Safeguard that your team works across business units and IT to align governance and business strategies. 

  

How do you integrate with data governance programs?

Confirm that your operation is involved in organizing governance and building relationships with key executives across your organization. 

  

How to develop an effective approach to manage, identify and understand integration requirements towards other corporate systems when adopting new SaaS application?

Manage best in class quality and simplification methodology and governance of process management. 

  

Do you have internal and external risk management programs for ongoing oversight and monitoring?

Check that your personnel is defining governance metrics and monitoring process for analytics. 

  

How do you find the right vision and roadmap to use information to a competitive advantage and support enterprise goals?

Verify that your company is organizing a governance structure responsible for platform strategic roadmap planning. 

  

Are there champions from other departments who will use the technology to help drive the change?

Engage with the industry to learn about standard methodologies, gain insightful competitive and regulatory intelligence to help in building excellence in your governance and quality initiatives. 

  

Do you currently maintain data governance processes for data integration, reporting, analysis, and/or planning?

Operationalize the AI/ML governance strategy as it pertains to overall governance activities and tools. 

  

How do you engage disparate technologies to locate data and protect it across different environments, while providing appropriate levels of security?

Collaborate cross functionally to develop and implement governance policies, balancing centralized control and standardization with decentralized speed and flexibility. 

  

What are the critical success factors that enable self service business intelligence success?

Serve as the technical lead to enable the governance tools across the enterprise.