Is Your Data Understood and Compliant? Here’s How to Fix It

Key Takeaways:

• Lack of shared data definitions, ownership, and built-in compliance creates risk and inefficiencies across your organization.
• Business-friendly governance and stewardship frameworks empower teams to trust, manage, and use data with confidence.
• Start small with clear roles, goals, glossaries, and workflows—and scale toward proactive, automated compliance and increased data visibility.

Every organization relies on data – but without shared understanding, visibility, and built-in compliance, data can quickly become a liability. When your teams don’t speak the same language or know who’s accountable, you risk:

• Inefficiencies, wasted time chasing definitions, and a lack of trust in analytics
• Conflicting reports and misaligned goals
• Unclear ownership, making it hard to resolve data issues
• Compliance violations that lead to fines and reputational damage

Without clear governance and stewardship, your data becomes a liability instead of a strategic asset. Let’s explore some of the common challenges that organizations like yours face, and how a structured approach to governance helps you overcome them.

3 Core Governance Challenges and Solutions

So, where do things start to go wrong? Let’s begin by breaking down three common challenges that prevent teams from understanding and trusting their data.

1️. The problem: No shared data definitions

When your business and technical teams define data differently, it leads to inconsistent reporting, lost productivity, and low trust. If people don’t trust the data, they won’t use it.

The solution: Build alignment across the board with a business glossary – especially one that’s accessible and collaborative across business and IT teams.

To determine whether this is the right approach for your business, ask yourself:
✔ Do we have a configurable business glossary that defines key terms, business goals, ownership, and policies?
✔ Can our teams confidently find and access data without needing IT intervention?

2️. The problem: Lack of data ownership and accountability

Without clear ownership, data quality and compliance suffer. Feel familiar? Then it’s also likely you’re your teams spend much of their time fixing issues instead of driving innovation.

The solution: Establish accountability without slowing down the process. Use business-friendly frameworks and workflows to answer questions including:

✔ Is there a clear owner for each data asset?
✔ Are governance workflows assigned to approvals and requests, and easy for all teams to use?

3️. The problem: Compliance is reactive, not built-in

When compliance isn’t built into your workflows, staying ahead of evolving regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and the evolving AI requirements becomes nearly impossible.

The solution: Rather than manually managing compliance, monitor it with automated metadata tracking and scalable workflows. These help to answer questions like:

✔ Can we demonstrate compliance at any time, with minimal manual effort?
✔ Are our compliance tasks integrated into our day-to-day governance activities?

How to Get Started

If any – or all – of these challenges ring true for your business, the good news is that fixing them doesn’t require a massive overhaul—just structured governance that aligns with business needs.

Here’s what that looks like if we break it down into four streamlined steps:

✅ Step 1: Standardize how data is defined

• Build a business glossary to eliminate confusion
• Implement a data catalog so teams can find what they need

✅ Step 2: Assign ownership & accountability

• Define who is responsible for each critical dataset
• Establish governance workflows that don’t slow your teams down

✅ Step 3: Proactively manage compliance

• Map data policies to key regulations (AI policies, GDPR, CCPA, etc.)
• Automate compliance monitoring to reduce manual effort

✅ Step 4: Improve data visibility & trust

• Track data lineage so your teams understand how data is used
• Automate and expose data quality checks to prevent reporting errors

📌 Want a quick reference guide? Check out the infographic: Is Your Data Understood and Compliant?

Data Governance: Your Strategic Advantage

If your data isn’t understood and compliant, it can’t drive business growth. By embedding governance into your daily operations, you:

• empower your teams to focus on high-impact, strategic work instead of tedious data issues
• eliminate inefficiencies
• enable innovation
• reduce risk

To start your governance program with a business-first approach that engages employees, quickly delivers high-value, low-effort wins, and establishes a foundation for growth, read our eBook: Four Steps to Improved Data Governance: A Business-First Approach.