Data Governance Framework: Protecting Your Organisation’s Assets

Data is at the heart of every modern organisation. But without clear rules around how it’s managed, shared, protected, and used, it can quickly become a liability instead of an asset.

What Is a Data Governance?

Data governance is the practice of managing data to ensure it is accurate, secure, available, and used responsibly across an organisation. Effective data governance ensures that data is treated as a strategic asset. It helps organisations:

• Maintain data quality and consistency
• Enable better decision-making through trustworthy data
• Reduce risk from misuse or breaches
• Comply with regulations and industry standards

Think of data governance as the overarching approach to how your organisation manages data. A data governance framework, on the other hand, provides the blueprint that puts this approach into practice.

What Is a Data Governance Framework?

A Data Governance Framework is a structured approach that defines how an organisation manages its data assets to ensure they are accurate, secure, consistent, and used responsibly. It outlines the roles, responsibilities, policies, processes, and standards that guide data-related decisions across the organisation.

At its core, a practical framework gives your people the clarity and confidence to handle data correctly - without creating unnecessary red tape.

Key Components of a Data Governance Framework

While every organisation’s needs will vary, a typical framework includes:

Roles and responsibilities: Define who owns the data, who can access it, and who ensures its accuracy.

Policies and standards: Set rules for data collection, sharing, use, classification, and disposal.

Data quality and integrity measures: Guidelines for accuracy, completeness, and timeliness.

Security: Ensure sensitive data is appropriately protected.

Compliance: Align policies to regulations and legislation such as GDPR or the Privacy Act, and standards such as ISO 27001, ISO27002, PCI.

Monitoring and continuous improvement: Implement processes to review, update, and audit governance practices.

A framework that combines these elements effectively supports both IT and business teams, creating consistency while enabling actionable data-driven decisions.

A Practical Approach to Data Governance

Some points to consider if you’re establishing a framework from scratch or improving an existing one:

What is outcome you wish to achieve - Are you prioritising compliance, security, or data quality?

Assign ownership - Give responsibility for data domains or systems to accountable individuals.  

Start small - Focus on high-risk or high-value data first with a view to delivering some quick wins.

Align with existing policies - Leverage current policies such as access control, information management or acceptable use to get the right foundations in place. The policies should be actionable, accessible, easy to read and understand

How PPS Can Help

Protocol Policy Systems (PPS) help to take the pressure off your IT and GRC teams by providing a ready-to-use tailored suite of IT policies mapped to international standards and best practice, including ISO 27001, ISO 27002, Cyber Essentials Plus, and PCI, giving your organisation a strong, reliable foundation for data governance without the burden of creating or maintaining policies from scratch.

Our cloud-based software and content management tools make it easy to implement and maintain the policies required for a fully operational governance framework quickly - in weeks rather than months or years. By combining tailored ready-to-use policies with a platform to manage them, we help teams focus on using data effectively instead of spending time managing documentation.

Need help establishing or reviewing your data governance framework?

Contact us today to find out how PPS can provide expert guidance and tailored policy services to strengthen your data governance.