Governance can be defined many different ways, there are hundreds of definitions there - and in B-Eye Best practices section of this site, there are discussions, white-papers, and so on.  Many resources to define governance.  My opinion on the matter is as follows:

* Governance for EDW and BI should be about managing, monitoring, optimizing, fixing whats broken, and producing ever increasing quality work product.  It involves people, process, and technology - all aspects of the game, and it's focus should be horizontally driven across lines of business in order to meet the needs of the enterprise and BI initiatives.

* Compliance for EDW and BI should be about the meeting agreements, showing progress in governance, between IT and internal business, and the enterprise and it's external customers.  Good "compliance" means (in my opinion) meeting service level agreements between organizations both inter-organization and intra-organization.  Applying compliance in the EDW BI landscape means upholding standards and delivering quality auditable information across the business.  Service level agreements should cover the "data" that is delivered, as well as the people and processes used to meet the needs.  Compliance means setting standards that multiple parties agree to, and then reaching those levels of delivery.

* Accountability for EDW and BI team should be about the ability of business to stand up and take ownership of mistakes made, errors and omissions in meeting both compliance and governance initiatives.  It should be horizontally focused across the enterprise, and should include the data warehouse information delivered in reports on a daily basis.  This includes the raw-data-store for good-bad-and-ugly data in the EDW, along with the "quality cleansed" data stores used in data marts, along with ensuring that numbers match at a corporate level when necessary.  Accountability is all about the people taking ownership of their mistakes, admitting errors, omissions, and optimization opportunities at the process level, then applying this to the systems.

These are my introductory thoughts, I would love to hear from you about what you would add, change, or remove from these definitions.

Cheers,

Dan L, DanL@GeneseeAcademy.com