Data Governance
Data governance is the framework — policies, ownership, standards, controls — that makes data trustworthy, compliant, and actually useful across an organization.
What is data governance?
Data governance is the set of policies, roles, processes, and tooling that defines how data is collected, stored, classified, accessed, retained, and deleted. In GTM specifically, governance covers consent management, opt-out handling, PII storage, vendor data-sharing, and the audit trail behind every record.
Why it matters
- GDPR, CCPA, and the wave of state privacy laws have made governance a legal requirement, not best practice
- AI training and inference on customer data is a fast-growing source of governance risk
- Without ownership, data quality decays — "everyone's job" means no one's job
Core elements
- Ownership — every dataset has a named owner accountable for quality
- Classification — what's PII, what's sensitive, what's public
- Access control — least privilege; reviewed quarterly
- Retention — defined per data class, automated deletion when terms expire
- Auditability — every change traceable to a user or system
How TexAu helps
TexAu logs every workflow run, every API call, and every record write — supporting audit trails for governance reviews, and respecting opt-out and suppression lists across enrichment and outbound steps.
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