Data governance: Parliamentary context

This sub-guideline is part of the guideline Data governance. Refer to the main guideline for context and an overview.

This sub-guideline examines the importance of data governance and provides an overview of related roles and responsibilities within parliament.

Data governance is crucial for coordinating efforts to enhance data quality and privacy. It encompasses policies, roles, responsibilities, processes and technology aimed at improving data quality and creating an optimal data environment.

Data governance provides guidance, assurance and support to transform parliaments into data-driven organizations through the following measures:

• Clearly defining roles and responsibilities for data management to ensure efficiency
• Introducing common rules, guidelines and practices for consistent data management across the organization
• Ensuring data security and protecting privacy
• Promoting easy access to, and usability of, data to support informed decision-making
• Maintaining the accuracy and integrity of data throughout its life cycle
• Ensuring compliance with relevant laws and regulations in data management practices
• Providing high-quality data to inform policymaking and strategic planning
• Fostering a data-centric culture that emphasizes the importance of privacy, data quality and data governance across all parliamentary units and processes

Figure 1 provides an overview of roles and responsibilities in data governance. Further discussion can be found in the remainder of this section.

Data owner

Every piece of data should have a data owner, who is in charge of decisions regarding data protection, data storage, data classification, data access, data formats, metadata, and all improvements necessary to make the data useful for parliament’s needs.

Data steward

Data owners designate a data steward to support them with managing data quality, ensuring compliance with policies, and facilitating communication between data owners and users.

Establishing data ownership

Practices for establishing data ownership can include the following:

• Establish clear ownership roles, assigning specific individuals or teams as data owners for each data set. These owners are responsible for the accuracy, integrity and security of the data throughout its life cycle.
• Establish data stewardship roles to support data owners. 
• Create ownership policies that outline the responsibilities and expectations of data owners, including practices for data creation, maintenance, access and disposal.
• Implement role-based access controls to ensure that only authorized individuals can access and modify data. 
• Conduct regular audits to verify that data ownership policies are being followed and that data quality standards are maintained. Use audit findings to make continuous improvements.
• Provide training programmes for data owners and stewards to ensure they understand their roles and responsibilities. 
• Encourage collaboration between data owners, data stewards and users to ensure that data management practices are aligned with parliament’s goals. Establish forums or committees for discussing data-related issues and making collective decisions.
• Implement monitoring tools to track data quality and ownership compliance. Generate regular reports to keep stakeholders informed of the status of data governance initiatives.
• Define data life cycle management practices, covering the entire process from creation to disposal. Ensure that data owners are responsible for overseeing this process.

Responsibilities of data owners

The responsibilities of data owners are as follows:

• Appoint one or more data stewards to support them in their role and to facilitate the implementation of the data ownership guidelines.
• Allocate resources to information ownership objectives.
• Apply operational guidelines and procedures for information ownership.
• Establish and measure data performance metrics and communicate about actual data performance.
• Establish future data requirements based on strategies and business trends.
• Position and manage data as a corporate asset.

Responsibilities of data stewards

The responsibilities of data stewards – some from business units, others from the IT unit – are as follows:

• Deploy and implement information ownership programmes, operational guidelines and procedures.
• Support audits of information ownership processes.
• Upgrade and develop information ownership processes.
• Provide intensive data-quality training to parliamentary staff.
• Help parliamentary staff to identify and solve data-related issues and problems.
• Determine and interpret trends in data quality.
• Support data-quality improvement efforts.
• Serve as first-line support to help users solve data accuracy issues, data definition issues and data usage issues.

Responsibilities of the chief information officer (or equivalent)

Parliament’s chief information officer (or equivalent), acting as the data custodian, has overall responsibility for the following aspects:

• Implement and maintain the infrastructure needed to deliver data from its point of capture and storage to a point of need.
• Manage the availability of systems to access, retrieve and manipulate data.
• Ensure the integration and consistency of data across multiple applications and sources.
• Ensure that backup and recovery procedures are in place to prevent data loss.
• Secure data access and provide up-to-date solutions to protect against malicious code.
• Implement an IT helpdesk function for the following purposes:
  • Logging data issues
  • Escalating data issues to the appropriate information owner
  • Connecting users with second-line support to help interpret data fields and/or information within data fields
  • Granting controlled access to data to authorized users
  • Optimizing operational efficiency and effectiveness
  • Monitoring and reporting data issues.

Responsibilities of parliamentary users

• Parliamentary users of AI-based systems have the following responsibilities:
• Participate in data-improvement initiatives.
• Enhance their job skills related to improved data quality.
• Capture data and utilize it in parliament’s processes in order to optimize operational efficiency and effectiveness.
• Monitor and report data issues to the data owner and/or the chief information officer.

The Guidelines for AI in parliaments are published by the IPU in collaboration with the Parliamentary Data Science Hub in the IPU’s Centre for Innovation in Parliament. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence. It may be freely shared and reused with acknowledgement of the IPU. For more information about the IPU’s work on artificial intelligence, please visit www.ipu.org/AI or contact [email protected].