The Enactment of Data Quality Governance

Abstract

Organizations put data quality governance in place to keep their data fit for use, yet when a concrete data quality problem arises, the response inside the organization often runs differently from what the designed arrangements prescribe. This research examines how client organizations across the public and private sectors enact the response to data quality issues and where that enactment diverges from what governance frameworks prescribe. It traces the full lifecycle of a data quality issue across six stages: detection, ownership assignment, escalation, prioritization, remediation, and learning and feedback. The study is exploratory and qualitative, grounded in Practice Theory, which distinguishes the formal practices meant to govern each stage, the praxis through which the work is actually done, and the practitioners who do it. Evidence comes from eleven interviews with data consultants describing client engagements, collected with the Critical Incident Technique and analyzed using Template Analysis, covering nineteen issue-response episodes across sectors including banking, healthcare, manufacturing, and the public sector. The central finding is that formal governance designs and the enacted response operated as two distinct layers rather than as one system, held together by practitioners who translate the frameworks into action rather than implement them as written. Issues moved through the lifecycle when an actor with real authority engaged, through internal mandate or external regulation, instead of because a process moved them. Known imperfections were routinely tolerated where the provable cost of fixing outweighed benefits that were hard to show in advance, so the cost-of-poor-quality argument could run in reverse. The findings describe consultant-mediated settings and are meant to transfer rather than generalize. The study contributes an empirical account of the end-to-end issue-response process, which no prior study in the reviewed literature had centered on, and gives governance designers a grounded view of where formal mechanisms hold and where informal practice does the work.