Issue Management is the process for identifying, quantifying, prioritizing, and resolving data governance-related issues, including:

• Authority: Questions regarding decision rights and procedures

• Change management escalations: Issues arising from the change management process

• Compliance: Issues with meeting compliance requirements

• Conflicts: Conflicting policies, procedures, business rules, names, definitions, standards, architecture, data ownerships and conflicting stakeholder interests in data and information

• Conformance: Issue related to conformance to policies, standards, architecture, and procedures

• Contracts: Negotiation and review of data sharing agreements, buying and selling data, and cloud storage

• Data security and identity: Privacy and confidentiality issues, including breach investigations

• Data quality: Detection and resolution of data quality issues, including disasters or security breaches

Many issues can arise locally in Data Stewardship teams. Issues requiring communication and / or escalation must be logged, and may be escalated to the Data Stewardship teams, or higher to the DGC, as shown in this figure. A Data Governance scorecard can be used to identify trends related to issues, such as where within the organization they occur, what their root causes are, etc. Issues that cannot be resolved by the DGC should be escalated to corporate governance and / or management.

Data governance requires control mechanisms and procedures for:

• Identifying, capturing, logging, tracking and updating issues

• Assignment and tracking of action items

• Documenting stakeholder viewpoints and resolution alternatives

• Determining, documenting, and communicating issue resolutions

• Facilitating objective, neutral discussions where all viewpoints are heard

• Escalating issues to higher levels of authority

Data issue management is very important. It builds credibility for the DG team, has direct, positive effects on data consumers, and relieves the burden on production support teams. Solving issue management requires control mechanisms that demonstrate the work effort and impact of resolution.