Do You Need a Data Governance Plan?
de maximis Data Management Solutions, Inc.
Do more with your investment in environmental data.
The ROI of Governing Your Data with a Plan
A Data Governance Plan is a governing document that defines the policies, standards, and accountability framework for your environmental data.
What does that mean?
If you work in mining, energy, or environmental remediation— really any industry handling environmental data — you’re constantly collecting, reporting, and sharing information that has real-world consequences. You can have the best management system in place, but if you don’t have rules for how decisions are made, who is responsible, and why the standards exist, your data is at risk of being inconsistent, non-compliant, or untrusted.
Two types of plans can help with that: a data management plan and a data governance plan. A data management plan is the “how.” A data governance plan is the “what” and the “why.” What are the policies? Why are these standards in place? Who enforces them? What does compliance look like?
You can have them as separate documents, or you can combine them.
Components of a Data Governance Plan
Policies and Standards — What rules govern your data? This includes metadata requirements, controlled vocabularies, reporting formats, and security standards.
Roles and Accountability — Who owns the data? Who stewards it? Who approves data releases? Governance removes the guesswork by spelling out accountability.
Quality Controls — How do you ensure accuracy, completeness, and timeliness? How do you resolve errors? Governance creates a consistent framework, instead of ad hoc fixes.
Security and Compliance — What are the access rules? How is usage tracked? Governance defines not only who has permission, but how compliance with State agencies, EPA, or other regulatory requirements is maintained.
Upcoming Events
A small team of ddms team members, including CEO Mark Packard, will be at the AWS re:Invent conference Dec 1-5 in Las Vegas.
If you'll be there too, look for us in our Data Nerd or ddms shirts!
Case Study
The development and management of site-specific US Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (DOE EM) database systems have been used to track and report environmental remediation progress. Initially homegrown by each of the individual EM facilities, these systems have evolved as technology advanced.
The Challenge
Any system, no matter how good, needs to be continuously updated. While the DOE EM environmental sampling program data systems grew organically to satisfy needs, they inadvertently created inefficiencies and security risks.
Read more about the challenge – and the solution here.
Do Even More With Your Data
The Project Portal team created a Rules Engine to automatically notify you when your data is telling you something important.
For example, you can get an alert when:
- a value meets or exceeds a threshold you created
- there isn’t any data when you were expecting it
- an operational pump stops working
The Rules engine will be available this spring in Project Portal.
Contact sales@ddmsinc.com to set up a demo to see how the functionality will save time and help you take the best action based on the data.
We hope you find this useful. If you have ideas for future content or questions, please email us at sales@ddmsinc.com.