Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Data Governance Lead

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires an experienced Data Governance Lead to design, implement, and operationalize an enterprise-wide data governance program. The ideal candidate will partner with business and technology stakeholders to define policies, standards, and processes that improve data quality, ensure regulatory compliance (GDPR/CCPA/etc.), and enable trusted, governed data for analytics and operations. This role combines strategy, hands-on stewardship, tooling expertise (e.g., Collibra, Alation, Informatica), and people leadership to embed governance practices across the organization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Data Governance Analyst or Data Steward
Data Quality Analyst or Business Analyst with governance exposure
Data Architect or Data Management Specialist

Advancement To:

Head of Data Governance
Director of Data Management / Data Strategy
Chief Data Officer (CDO)

Lateral Moves:

Data Privacy Officer / Privacy Program Lead
Enterprise Data Architect
Master Data Management (MDM) Program Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the development, maintenance, and continuous improvement of the enterprise data governance framework, including policies, standards, roles, responsibilities, and operating model to ensure consistent and sustainable governance across business units.
Own the data governance roadmap and program plan, prioritizing initiatives by business value, regulatory risk, and technical feasibility; work cross-functionally to deliver quarterly and annual milestones.
Define and roll out a clear data stewardship model: recruit, train, and enable business and technical data stewards; define RACI for critical data domains; and institutionalize stewardship workflows.
Establish and manage data policies and standards (naming conventions, master data rules, retention, access control) and lead policy adoption through governance councils and stakeholder engagement.
Design and operationalize data quality management processes: define data quality rules and thresholds, implement profiling and monitoring, lead remediation efforts, and report on quality KPIs to senior leadership.
Implement and govern metadata management and data catalog initiatives to ensure searchable, discoverable, and well-documented datasets, business terms, glossaries, and data lineage across the enterprise.
Build and maintain data lineage capabilities (technical and business lineage) to support impact analysis, change management, and regulatory requests; coordinate with data engineering to capture automated lineage where possible.
Partner with security, privacy, and legal teams to ensure governance supports regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) by driving data classification, access controls, consent management, and data subject request processes.
Lead the selection, implementation, and configuration of data governance and data catalog tools (Collibra, Alation, Informatica EDC, Talend, etc.), including integration with existing ETL, BI, and metadata systems.
Create and manage governance KPIs and dashboards (data quality scorecards, stewardship activity, policy adoption) and present program performance to executive sponsors and governance committees.
Drive master data management (MDM) governance activities, ensuring single source of truth for critical entities (customers, products, locations) and coordinating cross-system reconciliation and reference data standards.
Facilitate and chair data governance council meetings, working groups, and domain-specific steering groups to resolve escalations, approve policies, and accelerate issue resolution.
Define and operationalize data access and entitlement processes—approve access requests, establish role-based data access policies, and automate provisioning workflows with IAM and data platform teams.
Lead impact assessments for major data initiatives and projects, ensuring data governance considerations (quality, lineage, ownership) are embedded in project lifecycles from design to production.
Collaborate with data engineering and platform teams to embed governance guardrails into data pipelines and CI/CD processes (automated quality checks, schema validations, lineage capture).
Develop and deliver training, enablement programs, playbooks, and communication campaigns to increase governance adoption, literacy, and stewardship accountability across the business.
Manage incident response for data quality or governance breaches: lead root cause analysis, remediation plans, and executive reporting for high-impact data incidents.
Drive data classification and tagging programs, including sensitivity labeling, retention categories, and business criticality to inform lifecycle management and legal hold processes.
Partner with analytics, BI, and product teams to ensure governed data assets are fit for purpose for reporting, ML, and self-service analytics, and to define accepted SLAs for trusted datasets.
Establish vendor governance practices for third-party data providers, including onboarding, contractual SLAs for data quality, and periodic audits.
Mentor and grow a small governance team (stewards, analysts), define roles and expectations, and recruit talent to scale the governance program as needed.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Create templates and artifacts (data contracts, stewardship playbooks, onboarding checklists) to accelerate governance adoption.
Assist internal audit and compliance teams during audits by providing documentation, lineage maps, and evidence of governance activities.
Support business change management efforts when governance changes impact operational processes.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Expertise in enterprise data governance frameworks and methodologies (DAMA, DCAM, or equivalent) and practical experience operationalizing them.
Hands-on experience with metadata and data catalog tools such as Collibra, Alation, Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, or AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Strong knowledge of data quality tooling and practices (Informatica Data Quality, Talend, Great Expectations, Deequ) and experience defining data quality rules and automated monitoring.
Experience with master data management (MDM) concepts and tools (Informatica MDM, Reltio, Stibo) including entity resolution and reference data management.
Familiarity with data lineage solutions and techniques (both automated and manual) to support impact analysis and regulatory reporting.
Working knowledge of data privacy and protection requirements (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) and practical experience implementing data classification and consent management.
Proficiency with SQL for data profiling and investigation; familiarity with Python or R for ad-hoc analysis is a plus.
Practical experience integrating governance with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and understanding of cloud-native data security controls.
Understanding of data modeling, master data domains, and canonical data architecture patterns.
Experience with identity and access management (IAM), role-based access control (RBAC), and data access provisioning workflows.
Ability to use BI and reporting tools (Tableau, Power BI, Looker) to build governance dashboards and executive reports.
Familiarity with Agile delivery and product management practices for governance program execution.
Knowledge of compliance and audit processes, including preparing artifacts and evidence for internal/external audits.
Certifications such as CDMP (Certified Data Management Professional), DGSP, or privacy certifications (CIPP, CIPM) are advantageous.

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills; proven ability to build relationships at senior leadership and cross-functional peer levels.
Excellent verbal and written communication—able to translate technical governance concepts into business language and executive summaries.
Strategic thinker with the ability to balance business priorities and pragmatic governance controls.
Effective facilitator and meeting chair; comfortable leading governance councils and cross-functional working groups.
Problem-solving orientation and tenacity to drive issues through to closure in complex organizational contexts.
Change management capability with experience driving adoption and cultural shifts around data practices.
Organizational skills and attention to detail when managing multiple governance tracks, vendors, and delivery timelines.
Coaching and mentorship skills to develop stewardship capability across the business.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Business Administration, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Data Science, Information Management, Business Administration (MBA), or a relevant technical/management discipline.
Professional certifications: CDMP, Collibra certification, DGSP, CIPP/CIPM, or PMP/Prince2 for program leadership.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Systems / Information Management
Data Science / Analytics
Business Administration / Finance
Law / Compliance (for privacy-heavy roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–10+ years of progressive experience in data governance, data management, or related data roles; at least 3 years in a lead or senior advisory position.

Preferred:

8+ years in enterprise data governance or a combination of data management, data architecture, and compliance roles.
Demonstrated track record implementing data governance programs, selecting governance tooling, and partnering with C-level stakeholders.
Experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, insurance) or high-growth tech environments is highly desirable.