Lead, Data Governance

About the Role

This leadership position heads the central team responsible for ensuring data accuracy, consistency, availability, and quality across approximately 120 data domains and 870 data families within all company entities. The role drives data governance implementation for digital use cases and operations of the digital data platform, ensuring the integrity of data used for decision-making. It entails developing and executing the enterprise-wide data governance strategy by selecting and applying appropriate governance capabilities. The Lead acts as a trusted advisor to leadership on data governance challenges and solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Implement and oversee the enterprise data governance framework, strategy, and roadmap.
• Apply governance best practices to AI, advanced analytics, digital use cases, and data platform operations.
• Develop and maintain solutions that facilitate effective data governance.
• Drive company-wide data literacy initiatives and organizational capability enhancement.
• Define policies, standards, and guidelines regarding data governance and ensure their adoption.
• Manage the operational budget and data investments, approximately USD 2 million annually.

Job Dimensions

• Supervise two direct employees and manage five service contracts.
• Lead a central team working with 16 departments to improve data governance.
• Engage closely with digital teams, department points of contact, leadership, data owners, data stewards, and contractors.

Core Activities

• Lead and promote enterprise data governance including user training, role models, and data standards to enhance data access, quality, and analytical capacity.
• Advance organizational data literacy, emphasizing the value and application of data.
• Evaluate data governance maturity yearly and develop improvement plans.
• Represent data management teams and enterprise data stewards in leadership forums, delivering presentations and guiding governance committees.
• Collaborate with business and IT stakeholders providing expert advice and supporting successful data management solutions.
• Participate in scoping and evaluating AI, advanced analytics, and digital initiatives and vendor proposals.
• Ensure data quality rules, data lineage, and business glossaries are properly documented and approved for all digital use cases.
• Establish and advance an enterprise AI governance framework that sets operating boundaries, governance controls, quality assurance mechanisms, and strategic roadmaps.
• Onboard digital use case owners and data stewards onto governance tools to monitor data usage, quality, and assignments.
• Define and enforce master data management scope through establishing data quality checks.
• Ensure compliance with data certification standards through validation of source and destination data during load or migration activities.
• Lead identification and configuration of data hierarchies, roles, catalogs, quality metrics, and business glossaries in data governance tools based on Oil and Gas standards.
• Prioritize and maintain data quality controls and collaborate with departments to address and report data issues to senior management.
• Capture business data challenges and propose effective solutions.
• Provide reports on progress and challenges to senior management via Data Council and Data Platform Governance Steering Committees.
• Develop data management policies, procedures, and guidelines tailored to company needs.
• Lead development and implementation of enterprise metadata standards and processes to guarantee quality metadata and support data governance.
• Monitor compliance with all data governance policies and procedures.
• Oversee data sources to ensure they align with established policies and best practices.
• Coordinate with data operations to meet governance requirements.
• Promote development and upskilling in data governance and management within the team.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Management or a related engineering or business field from an accredited institution.
• Over 10 years of experience in data management within Oil and Gas upstream/downstream operations and major capital projects.
• At least 5 years in a leadership role overseeing engineering information projects including definition and implementation phases.
• Proven hands-on experience developing data governance strategies, frameworks, roadmaps, and onboarding data roles such as data owners and stewards.
• Demonstrated success in implementing scalable data governance technology platforms (including business glossaries, data lineage, and data quality tools).
• Strong knowledge of data management solutions such as data visualization, BI, data science, data warehouses/lakes, master data management, data modeling, and enterprise document management systems.
• Experience in change management, program management, and stakeholder engagement.
• Familiarity with data integration techniques.
• Understanding of upstream and downstream Digital Information Management requirements.
• Knowledgeable in database systems, EDMS solutions, and BI technologies.
• Familiar with application architecture and information security principles.
• Fluent in both written and spoken English.