The Governance Council & Operating Model

The Governance Council & Operating Model

Council + owners + stewards + custodians — RACI, cadence, and the decisions only the council can make.

Why it matters

Councils that meet without an agenda or RACI become talking shops; councils that decide nothing get disbanded. DMBOK is explicit about which decisions land at council level vs which delegate to owners.

Going deeper

Decisions that belong only at the Governance Council (per DMBOK §3.3):

• Ratify the governance charter, principles and exception policy.
• Approve new domains / data products that cross owner boundaries.
• Approve cross-domain definitions for canonical concepts (Customer, Product).
• Approve exceptions to enterprise policy.
• Decide investment priorities across KAs.

Everything else — daily quality decisions, lineage curation, access reviews — should delegate down. A council that approves SQL patches is not a governance body; it is a bottleneck.

A Data Governance Council is the board of directors of a holding company.

A holding-company board doesn't approve the colour of office paint at each subsidiary — it ratifies the operating principles, approves M&A, and holds CEOs accountable. When boards drift into operational decisions they (a) bottleneck the business and (b) lose authority over the strategic ones that actually need them.

The same dynamic kills 80% of data councils: meetings clogged with column renames and dashboard typos, with nobody left awake when the real cross-domain definition question lands. RACI ruthlessly: ‘owners decide unless the decision crosses owner boundaries’.