Building a data culture for data sharing and data governance at scale

At Monash University we have established capabilities for sharing enterprise data through our data lakehouse in our MS Azure–Databricks platform. Uptake of the platform is increasing rapidly and is leading to widespread use of our data for insights and business decisions. We have achieved this by investing significant effort upfront in setting up data governance and data stewardship capabilities.

Key Takeaways

• Data governance requires shifting organisational culture from a focus on IT systems to a data-centric one 
• Preparing the culture to make the transition requires time
• Starting small by building processes for data sharing across just one platform has positioned us to establish a robust and scalable framework for sharing data with our Monash community. 
• Building the data stewardship capability across our business means we now have a group that is ready to work with us on implementing leading data governance tools: Informatica’s CDGC and Databricks’ Unity Catalog.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Bio

Fiona Neilson Onfidan – Data & Platform Governance Lead | Monash University | Australia

Dr Fiona Neilson is the Data and Platform Governance Lead in Data Engineering Services, Monash University. She is overseeing the implementation of the Data Governance Framework across the organisation, including two major new data governance tools: Informatica Cloud Data Governance Catalogue and Databricks Unity Catalog. Fiona has had extensive experience in higher education in leadership, research management and change management roles prior to moving into data management and graduating as a Data Scientist.