Data Governance
What is Data Governance?
Governance is the part of data work that isn't a technical problem. It's the agreed-upon answers to who owns which fields, what counts as a 'lead', what data can be exported by whom, which sources are approved, how long data is retained, how PII is handled, who can grant access, and what happens when those rules are broken. Without governance, individual tools and teams set their own standards and the stack drifts into incompatibility. With governance, the data layer becomes a shared asset rather than a collection of private piles. The discipline has gotten more important as privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, the 2026 wave of US state laws) raise the cost of getting it wrong.
Why it matters
- Makes compliance with privacy regulations practical — the rules exist somewhere other than one person's head.
- Prevents the data-quality decay that comes from undefined ownership.
- Lets the organization scale data access without proportionally scaling risk.
Use cases
- Field ownership matrix. Explicit list of which team owns each major field.
- PII handling policy. What data is collected, how long it's kept, who can access it.
- Provider approval process. List of approved data sources, with review for new ones.
How turgo helps
turgo treats governance as a system, not a doc — field ownership, access scopes, retention rules, and audit logs are configured and enforced in-product, not in a wiki nobody reads.
See turgo in action →
