Part of alignment includes developing organizational touchpoints for Data Governance work. The CDO Organizational Touch Points figure illustrates examples of touch points that support alignment and cohesiveness of an enterprise data governance and data management approach in areas outside the direct authority of the Chief Data Officer.

• Procurements and Contracts: The CDO works with a Vendor/Partner Management or Procurement to develop and enforce standard contract language vis-a-vis data management contracts. These could include Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) and cloud-related procurements, other outsourcing arrangements, third-party development efforts, or content acquisition / licensing deals, and possibly data-centric IT tools acquisitions and upgrades.
• Budget and Funding: If the CDO is not directly in control of all data acquisition-related budgets, then the office can be a focal point for preventing duplicate efforts and ensuring optimizations of acquired data assets.
• Regulatory Compliance: The CDO understands and works within required local, national, and international regulatory environments, and how these impact the organization and their data management activities. Ongoing monitoring is performed to identify and track new and potential impacts and requirements.

• SDLC / development framework: The data governance program identifies control points where enterprise policies, processes, and standards can be developed in the system or application development lifecycles.

The touch points that the CDO influences support the organization's cohesiveness in managing its data, therefore, increasing its nimbleness to use its data. In essence, this is a vision of how DG will be perceived by the organization.