Leveraging best practices in data governance: An organization-wide data inventory and mapping project to support a five year data strategy

IntroductionThe professional regulation sector is moving toward risk-informed approaches that require high quality data. A key component of a corporate 2017 Data Strategy is the implementation of a data inventory and mapping project to catalogue, centralize, document and govern data assets that support regulatory decisions, programs and operations.
 Objectives and ApproachIn a data rich organization, the goals of the data inventory are to: enhance authoritative data that support programs; identify data duplications/gaps; identify data sources, owners and users; and, apply consistent data management and standards organizationally. Routinely used data assets outside the large enterprise workflow system (excel/word files; databases; paper collections) were catalogued. Using data governance principles and a facilitated questionnaire, departmental data stewards were interviewed about their generated data. Questions included data purpose/sources/types/formats/owners, retention rates, analytical products, gaps and visions for a desired data state. A data mapping methodology highlighted data set and variable connections within and across departments.
 ResultsTo date, over 40 staf