The Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) — which generates hydroelectric power and supplies water from six lakes on the Colorado River in central Texas — established an enterprise data governance program.
Rhiannon Gainor Sanchez, enterprise data architect for LCRA, took primary responsibility for building organizational consensus for enterprise management of data by convening representatives from areas such as regulatory and market compliance, legal, enterprise architecture, digital services, records management and cybersecurity.
Impact
The program establishes guidelines, tools and best practices required to ensure LCRA’s data assets are available, accurate and useful. It includes provisions for data governance, ownership, quality, standards and architecture.
This program is responsible for:
- Protecting data
- Verifying that data housed in the system is discoverable and useful
- Defining data ownership and access
- Adopting data lifecycle management tools
- Confirming the feasibility of future data integrations and data sharing within LCRA’s larger digital environment
Advice
The district recommends the following:
- Develop a shared understanding across the organization about the importance of data as an enterprise asset.
- Structure a program that includes key stakeholders from business, regulatory and IT functions.
- Assign specific responsibilities to data owners, data stewards and individual employees.
- Provide ongoing training and programmatic support.
