Much of the talking and writing about data governance these days is about how to start a data governance programme. This includes the roadmap, funding, getting stakeholders interested and that kind of stuff. Focussing on how to get a data governance programme off the ground is natural, as this is the struggle right now in many organizations.
But hopefully when, and not if, the data governance programme has left the ground and is a reality, what does the daily life look like then? I think this drawing can be a good illustration:
The drawing is taken from the Data Governance Institute Framework provided by Gwen Thomas.
As a fan of agile approaches within most disciplines including data governance, it is worth remarking that the daily life should not be seen as an end result of a long implementation. It should certainly be seen as the above concept being upgraded over time in more and more mature versions probably starting with a very basic version addressing main pain points within your organization.
When starting a data governance programme there is typically a lot of existing business rules to be documented in a consistent way. That is one thing. Another thing is to establish the process that deals with data aspects of changing business rules and taking on new business rules as touched in the post Two Kinds of Business Rules within Data Governance.
The ongoing service and the issue resolution part is very much relying on some kind of organizational structure. This could include one of my favourites being collaboration fora between data stewards, maybe a data governance office and usually a data governance council of some name. And perhaps having a Chief Data Officer (CDO) as mentioned in post The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Data Governance Role.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 