Governance Operating Model

Governance Operating Model

Council + owners + stewards + custodians — who decides, who owns, who curates, who runs?

Why it matters

A working governance model is four roles, ratified by a cross-functional council, with a lightweight exception process. Anything heavier dies in adoption.

Going deeper

The four roles map cleanly to RACI for any governance decision:

Decision	Council	Owner	Steward	Custodian
Policy ratification	A	C	C	I
Domain scope / definitions	I	A	R	I
Daily DQ + issue triage	I	C	A	C
Storage / access enforcement	I	C	C	A

If two cells in the same row both hold A, you've duplicated accountability and created a future blame fight. If a row has no A, that decision will fall through the floor.

Governance itself is the system of decision rights and accountabilities that turns data principles into repeatable choices. Its minimum operating cycle is: propose a standard, identify the accountable role, ratify it at the correct level, encode it in a workflow or platform control, observe compliance, manage exceptions, and revise the standard from incident evidence. A catalog, quality tool, or council implements pieces of this cycle; none is governance by itself. Central governance sets enterprise invariants such as privacy classification, while domain governance owns definitions and thresholds that require local business knowledge.

Think of a governance model as the operating crew of a museum.

• The board of trustees sets policy on what the museum collects and how it treats visitors. That's your data council.
• Each gallery has a curator — the named expert responsible for what hangs on the walls and whether the labels are right. That's your data owner per domain.
• Conservators quietly fix the cracks, clean the paint, swap out the lighting. Day-to-day quality. That's your data steward.
• Building services run the HVAC, the security alarms, the loading dock. They don't decide what's on the walls; they keep the building open. That's your data custodian (the platform / DBA team).

Confuse curator with conservator and the gallery looks great but the paint flakes. Confuse either with building services and the doors lock at 6 p.m. with no warning.