With data protection regulations becoming stricter, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to ensure data quality. Some studies show that only 3% of the average business’s data meets quality standards.
With 2025 seeing more localized data regulations coming into effect, maintaining quality standards is more crucial than before.
The key to doing so is to create and implement effective governance strategies. As a business, you’ll also have to ensure that these governance strategies align with business goals.
In this article, we’ll explore the challenges faced by businesses when aligning data governance strategies. We’ll also look at the advancement in data governance strategies and how you can use them to create robust data governance alignment in 2025.
Key Takeaways
- Businesses have to ensure effective data governance alignment to comply with data privacy regulations and quality standards.
- Miscommunication, a lack of standardized norms, and changing compliance regulations are the key challenges businesses face in maintaining effective data governance standards.
- Ensuring data vision and strategy are aligned with data management processes is crucial for effective governance. Nowadays advanced tools and compliance service providers can help you streamline this process.
Exploring Data Governance Standards
Data governance standards are the processes and rules every business implements to ensure data quality is preserved. Governance standards also guide businesses on how to use data effectively, and how to ensure data is processed in a standardized way.
However, data governance includes more than simply ensuring data quality. Following governance standards also ensures your business is compliant with data compliance regulations.
The key to implementing successful data governance strategies is to ensure they’re aligned with data compliance regulations. However, data regulations are rapidly changing and you’ll have to ensure compliance with both general and industry-specific regulations.
This is where the challenge of data governance alignment strategies lies.
The Need for Updated Data Governance Practices
The solution lies in viewing data governance as a continuous process and aligning governance strategies with regulatory requirements. However, the biggest obstacle you’ll face when implementing new data governance practices is changing the business’s culture.
You’ll also need to implement effective processes for managing and governing data, which is usually something a compliance specialist will help with. This process includes everything from establishing data policies to setting standards and ensuring compliance requirements are met.
Confronting Alignment Challenges in Data Governance
Implementing a data governance policy may sound simple, but it’s more complex than you may realize. Apart from the obvious challenge of keeping business systems updated with policy changes, you’ll also have to adapt to new technologies and ensure that the business culture is flexible enough to change.
However, the most difficult alignment challenge is ensuring that business data meets quality standards. Since only 3% of business data meets quality governance standards on average, you’ll need accurate monitoring systems for effective governance.
Other common data governance alignment challenges your business may face include:
- Communication Barriers
A lack of effective communication is the main reason why most governance initiatives fail. And, unlike what most people assume, communication isn’t limited to a certain project or department. Communication within a single department is usually more effective due to the delegation of responsibilities.
However, most businesses fail when it comes to communication between departments. For example, the cybersecurity team may find incomplete data or missing data values that could potentially lead to breaches, but unless other departments work towards fixing the root cause, you won’t see any improvement.
This is why effective communication is the crux of data governance alignment.
- Structural Changes
While structural changes are occasional occurrences, they will affect your business’s data alignment from time to time. The problem with structural changes is that they can overhaul the entire data management structure, and you’ll need to update your alignment strategy accordingly to stay compliant.
When it comes to dealing with structural changes, a helpful tip is to redo the groundwork for data management.
The main process remains the same – define the business’s data requirements and goals, make sure they are aligned, ensure compliance regulations are met, and create governance systems based on the new data framework.
- A Lack of Standardized Norms, Values, and Procedures
If your business operates across multiple industries or in different countries, you’ll likely face the challenge of dealing with a lack of standardized norms. Data terms and processing procedures may be different in the EU and US, and ensuring they’re standardized is an additional step in the data alignment process.
However, there are standardized norms that you can implement, regardless of the industry or country where business data is processed.
- Changing Data Compliance Regulations
Before the GDPR, and similar data privacy regulations, taking care of data privacy norms was almost “optional”. However, with the recent regulatory changes, more businesses are changing their data governance strategies to be aligned with privacy regulations.
Industry regulations also change with technological changes. For example, cookie data was previously regarded as necessary, but now almost every website collects user data for marketing.
With the GDPR and other privacy regulations classifying this data as “personal”, you’ll have to change your governance policies accordingly
Leveraging Technology for Data Governance Harmony
As with all data governance challenges, adopting technology can also help you overcome data alignment challenges. Data management tools can help align everything from data discovery to data mapping and ensure compliance with data privacy laws.
Let’s explore the technologies used for data governance alignment more closely:
- Data Mapping Tools
Before laying out the data governance practices in your business, it’s important to know what type of data your business processes, where the data is stored, and which departments have access to the data.
This falls under the data mapping process and it’s a crucial part of data governance alignment. However, mapping out hundreds of thousands of data sets is difficult without automated data mapping tools.
Many data mapping tools also have built-in data compliance integrations which help ensure regulatory compliance.
- Data Quality Tools
Data governance isn’t possible to achieve without having quality controls in place. Fortunately, you can automate this process as well. Data quality tools help ensure your business’s data is aligned with quality controls and follows best practices.
These tools can prevent duplicate data sets, ensure data accuracy, and also help prevent data breaches.
- Data Security Tools
The latest data on security breaches shows that around 53% of companies have experienced data breaches related to third parties in the past year. While most data breaches are caused by third parties, you can implement prevention measures to ensure your business isn’t the victim of a breach.
This is where data security tools are handy. Cybersecurity software, anti-malware software, tools for monitoring log access, and firewalls are some tools to ensure data is protected in the business.
It’s important to know which cybersecurity frameworks you have to follow to remain compliant with industry-specific cybersecurity requirements.
- AI Data Governanance Tools
While previously businesses had to implement data management tools separately, AI has helped integrate all these tools onto a single platform. AI tools are beneficial in predicting data patterns and establishing standardized procedures for better data governance alignment.
Crafting Optimal Practices for Data Governance Alignment
Having tools to ensure accurate data alignment is great, but you’ll still need to implement policies and frameworks for better data governance.
Here are some steps to establish a robust data governance framework:
- Establish a Data Governance Vision and Strategy
Without a strategy, you’ll simply be chasing compliance regulations, and it’s almost impossible to establish a positive governance culture. A data governance vision can be as simple as ensuring business data is protected, but it’s critical to have one.
- Assign Governance Roles
Once you have a clear strategy of how to manage data in the business, it’s time to assign governance roles. Who’s responsible for ensuring data quality standards are maintained? Which department has to ensure data compliance standards are met? And which departments should have access to sensitive business data?
These procedures are usually established in your business’s data policy, and it’s best to outsource this to a data protection service provider.
- Set Data Quality Standards
There’s no point in meeting the minimum requirements for data security if quality standards aren’t met in your business. Data mapping, metadata management, impact analysis, and data audits are all part of the data quality process.
- Establish Security Procedures
With more than 50% of businesses dealing with data breaches, protecting sensitive business data is a challenge. Fortunately, it’s usually something you can control through proper security procedures.
These include setting up firewalls, restricting log access to sensitive data, and implementing cybersecurity frameworks.
- Consistent Monitoring and Control
Once you have all the procedures in place, you’ll need to implement a system for monitoring the state of data governance. This process checks if the vision and governance strategy align with actual governance practices.
If you outsource compliance to data specialists, they’ll do regular data audits to establish if the governance practices are up to standards.
Collaboration Dynamics and Industry Trends in Data Governance
With businesses processing more data than ever before, businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on third parties for data management. If used correctly, third-party data management tools can help process large amounts of data in real-time, giving you more accurate trends and analysis.
However, this also leads to the risk of third-party data breaches, which is why choosing the right data management partners is crucial.
At Captain Compliance, we understand the need for aligning data compliance regulations, quality standards, and third-party tools, which is why we help with data audits, setting up a privacy policy, and aligning your business’s data goals.
Future Perspectives on Data Governance Alignment
Not too long ago most businesses saw no need to have data governance alignment. However, with the volume of business data being processed, and the negative impacts of non-alignment, aligning your data strategies with best practices has become a necessity.
The future of data governance alignment is both promising and full of challenges.
As mentioned previously, AI has the potential to streamline large data operations with more accuracy than manually operated data tools. In the near future, your business will have access to more AI data management tools, many of which can automate data discovery, data mapping, and even data analysis.
Another major data governance trend from last year is automation. Nowadays, automated tools can handle everything from the initial processing of data to classification and even advanced analysis. Some tools, like IBM Infosphere allow for real-time data mapping and analysis.
The advantage of implementing these tools is faster and more accurate analysis. AI tools can also give strategy suggestions, and some have advanced predictive analysis features to reduce the negative effect of incomplete data sets.
Final Thoughts
Aligning business goals with compliance requirements and data governance best practices is challenging. The key to effective governance alignment is to implement governance tools that cover everything from data mapping to strategic alignment.
However, you’ll have to do regular data audits and set up a data privacy policy, all while ensuring your governance policies are in line with compliance regulations.
This is where we come in. At Captain Compliance, we help businesses with compliance solutions ranging from data audits to updating privacy policies and more.
Check out the range of our compliance services today!
FAQs
How Can Companies Overcome Data Governance Challenges?
The best way to overcome data governance challenges is to establish standardized data processing conventions and automate the process to reduce the risk of human error.
What Role Does Technology Play in Harmonizing Data Governance Efforts?
Technology plays a critical role in ensuring data governance strategies are in line with data management best practices. With most data management caused by human error, implementing technology to automate the process can improve the effectiveness of business data governance alignment.
How Can Businesses Prepare for the Future of Data Governance Alignment?
Businesses can prepare for future trends in data governance alignment by staying updated with data compliance policy changes, implementing new governance technology, and automating the data analysis process.
Why is Synchronizing Data Governance Crucial for Businesses in 2025?
The recent changes in data compliance regulations mean businesses have to align their governance policies accordingly. Effective data governance synchronization isn’t only useful for staying compliant though- it also helps reduce the risk of quality issues and security breaches.
