The first published data governance framework was the work of Gwen Thomas, who founded the Data Governance Institute (DGI) and put her opus online in 2003. “Frameworks were already being used, but they weren’t publicly available,” she says. “I had been asked to help Coors Beer prepare for upcoming Sarbanes-Oxley audits. They already had a technical plan in place, and I helped them find the right size and structure of an accompanying data governance program. Throughout my time at Coors, I saw many examples of how they used the power of frameworks to keep everybody’s thoughts and actions in sync. That’s when I decided to write a more general framework that could be accessed by any organization and adapted to their needs.”
