What Is Data Governance?

Data governance is the broader organizational discipline of defining policies, ownership, and standards for how data is collected, stored, and used across a company. It's distinct from data assurance, which focuses specifically on verifying that tags and tracking behavior on a live website actually match those policies in real time.

Governance sets the rules; assurance checks whether reality matches them. A company can have a thorough data governance policy, clear ownership, documented retention rules, and still have a Meta Pixel on its site leaking PII in direct violation of that policy, simply because nobody is verifying tag behavior against it. Governance without verification is a document nobody’s checking against; verification without governance has no standard to check against. See Data Assurance.