You wouldn't speed down a mountain road if it didn't have strong guardrails-why approach Data Governance any differently?We've all heard the numbers. Global data production is increasing at an exponential rate. While none of us has to deal with ALL that data, the pattern is clear: the more our business focuses on leveraging the value inherent in our data, the more data we need to manage. What most companies, large and small, regardless of business sector, need to establish is a sense of Holistic Data Governance: Data Governance that is aware of both the needs of the organization as a whole and as the sum of its parts, and that establishes firm guardrails to ensure consistency across the whole company.This book is the first in a series covering how to adopt a consistent, integrated approach to managing data at scale. In this initial volume, we focus on the definition of a foundational set of Data Governance Guardrails that work together to unite the best thinking of the organization in a manner that allows us to accommodate the varying needs of different parts of the company while simultaneously providing the consistency of approach that will enable us to scale effectively and efficiently across the entire company.We start by knowing and documenting what is important to the organization and showing how that drives our approach to the data that supports those high-level business goals. We then look at the processes for using, managing, and governing that data before creating high-level, strategic instructions that inform how we work with our data. Collectively, this forms a hierarchy of documents that encapsulates our most important thinking about how and why data matters to us.