Oman Data Governance and Management Office Establishment Guidelines

 Oman Data Governance and Management Office Establishment Guidelines

The Sultanate of Oman has established comprehensive guidelines to assist government entities in setting up Data Governance and Management Offices (DGMO), as part of its broader National Data Governance and Management Regulatory Framework. These guidelines are detailed in the "Data Governance and Management Office Establishment Guidelines" issued by the Ministry of Transport, Communications, and Information Technology (MTCIT).  

Oman’s strategic vision under Vision 2040 positions data as a critical national asset. As government entities drive digital transformation, robust data governance is essential for transparency, innovation, and economic growth.

National Data Governance Vision and Mission

Vision: Data as a key enabler for decision-making and leading economic development in the Sultanate of Oman

Mission: Activate an effective national data governance framework that fosters collaboration between data owners and end users, through setting clear directions with the required level of policies for managing and governing data, adopting best practices, and ensuring continuous compliance, to reposition data as a driving force for the national economy.4

National Data Governance Framework

The National Data Governance framework outlines a structured approach to help entities manage their data effectively. It involves defining policies, processes, and responsibilities to ensure that data is managed in a consistent manner throughout the data lifecycle. The framework comprises of three components:

·        National Data Governance and Management Policies – The policies outline the necessary requirements across 13 out of the 14 data governance and management domains to establish a robust data governance practice within the government entities. The Document and Content Management domain will be covered by the existing policies/laws developed for the sultanate.

·        Data Governance and Management Office Establishment Guidelines – The guidelines provide the necessary elements to support the government entities for establishing their Data Governance and Management Office including the mandate, services and processes, organization structure, roles, and responsibilities, positioning within the entity and governance model.

·        National Data Governance and Management Compliance Assessment Model -The model outlines the compliance assessment methodology, the implementation priorities, and the assessment criteria for enabling the government entities to comply with the national data governance and management policies.

Key Components of the Guidelines

  1. Organizational Structure and Roles: The guidelines recommend the formation of a dedicated DGMO within each government entity. This office should have clearly defined roles and responsibilities to oversee data governance and management activities.
  2. Core Functions: The DGMO is expected to handle various tasks, including data quality management, metadata management, data security, and compliance with data-related policies. It should also coordinate with other departments to ensure effective data utilization.
  3. Competency Requirements: Personnel within the DGMO should possess specific competencies in data management, analytics, and policy implementation to effectively carry out their duties.
  4. Processes and Services: The guidelines outline standard processes for data lifecycle management, including data collection, storage, processing, and dissemination. They also emphasize the importance of establishing services that support data sharing and interoperability among government entities.
  5. Compliance and Assessment: To ensure adherence to national data governance policies, the guidelines introduce a compliance assessment model. This model provides a methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of data governance practices within government entities.

These guidelines are part of a broader initiative to enhance data governance in Oman, which also includes the National Data Governance and Management Policies and a Compliance Assessment Model. Together, these components aim to standardize data management practices across government entities, ensuring data is treated as a strategic asset to support decision-making and public service delivery.

Data Governance Principles

1.        Data is a national asset Develop practices that enable realization of the inherent value of data as a national asset to drive innovation and unlock economic growth through data integrity, monetization, transparency and accountability

2.        A data-driven culture is encouraged Establish processes and develop skills required for entities to utilize their data, derive meaningful insights and leverage technology to improve their decision making and operational efficiency.

3.        Data is shared and is available on time Develop practices to facilitate seamless internal and external sharing of data, ensuring that data users obtain information in a timely manner, thereby improving the quality and efficiency of decision-making processes.

4.        Data is trusted by all stakeholders Establish practices for providing reliable, accurate and fit for purpose data to build datatrust and confidence thereby, facilitating informed decision making

5.        Data is understood uniformly across all stakeholders Establish practices that enable a uniform understanding of the data to facilitate efficient data exchange and analysis thereby promoting reliability and efficiency in utilizing data assets within the entity.

6.        Data practices are compliant with regulatory requirements Develop data governance and management practices that uphold the regulatory requirements to ensure lawful, ethical and responsible handling of data across the business processes of the entities.

7.        Data is managed across its lifecycle as per business needs Develop practices that help collect, store, dispose/archive data as per its relevance and purpose along with delivering it to the data consumers.

 

Data Governance and Management (DGM) Office Value Proposition

Data Governance and Management Office plays a crucial role in an entity by overseeing and managing the entity’s data management strategy while ensuring alignment with its overarching vision and goals. The potential advantages of the data governance and management office are as follows

·        Regulatory Compliance - The DGM Office ensures accountability for developing, implementing, and ensuring adherence to the data governance and management policies in alignment with the National Data Governance Framework. It facilitates timely availability of reliable and consistent data essential for regulatory reporting through standardized processes for managing data quality and creating data catalogues, thus ensuring regulatory compliance.

 

·        Strategic Decision-Making - The DGM Office supports informed strategic decision-making by delivering precise insights, achieved through the enhancement of data quality, availability, use cases, and associated controls.

 

·        Operational Efficiency - The DGM office promotes seamless data sharing and collaboration by providing guidelines for establishing data stewardship and accountabilities. Additionally, reduces data redundancies by establishing processes for business units to consolidate their critical data into a single source of truth.

 

·        Stakeholder Trust - The DGM Office promotes data transparency by facilitating implementation of standardized processes for data classification, privacy, and personal data protection.

 

·        Economic growth - The DGM Office supports the development of policies and processes that adhere to regulatory requirements and provision of open data, advanced analytics, and data monetization which promotes creating new revenue streams leveraging the organization’s data.

 

Data Governance and Management Office Mandate

The entity shall establish a Data Governance and Management Office to drive its Data Governance program. The Data Governance and Management Office shall carry out the following key responsibilities:

 · Develop the entity’s data management strategy, steer its execution through development of an implementation plan and establish key performance metrics to continuously monitor progress of the entity’s data governance program.

· Develop and review the entity’s data governance and management policies and processes in accordance with its strategic business objectives and the National Data Governance and Management policies.

· Coordinate with the business units and supervise their data cataloguing and data quality management implementation.

· Support the entity to transform into a data-driven organization by extracting insights and achieving financial returns from data.

· Oversee methods for data sharing and storage along with open data publishing while establishing mechanisms for citizens to request and access public data.

· Conduct employee training sessions and awareness workshops for data governance practices.

 · Ensure compliance to the National Data Governance and Management framework4, prepare compliance reports and present them to the senior leadership, sector regulators (if applicable) and MTCIT.

· Document and maintain the issues escalated to the Data Governance Committee, the decisions taken on them along with the approval received.

· Represent the entity and attend relevant national and sectoral meetings and initiatives for data governance.

 

The Data Governance and Management Office shall be providing the following Data Governance services through the related processes

1.        Data Management Strategy and Implementation Roadmap Development - This service aims to develop the data management strategy of the entity and oversee its implementation through a roadmap of initiatives and projects through collaboration with the entity’s business units along with periodic monitoring.

2.        Data Governance and Management Policies and Processes Development and Review - This service aims to develop and enforce the policies and processes for data governance and management aligning to the strategic objectives of the entity as well as the National Data Governance Framework.

3.        Data Catalog Development and Management - This service aims to supervise the development and periodic updates to the entity’s data dictionary and business glossary.

4.        Data Classification Governance - This service aims to supervise the entity’s methods for classifying their information assets along with development of artifacts for maintaining the classification information.

5.        Data Quality Governance - This service aims to oversee the development of the framework and processes required to manage and implement data quality activities and to ensure the periodic monitoring of data quality levels. It also includes identifying and remediating data quality issues.

6.        Data Architecture Governance - This service aims to oversee and ensure that the business needs are translated into requirements for managing the data across its lifecycle.

7.        Data Sharing Governance - This service aims to oversee the management and handling of data sharing and sharing agreement.

8.        Data Analytics Governance - This service aims to oversee identification and prioritization of the analytics use cases based on the entity’s strategic requirements across business units within the entity.

9.        Open Data Implementation Oversight - This service aims to support the business units to identify, finalize, and publish open data assets for public use.

10.   Reference and Master Data Governance - This service aims to oversee the identification and operationalization of the reference and master data objects within the entity.

11.   Data Monetization Governance - This service aims to oversee identification, prioritization and implementation of the opportunities for Data Monetization based on entity’s strategic requirements.

12.   Public Information Request Management Oversight - This service aims to supervise the processes for managing the citizen requests to access the entity’s public information.

13.   Personal Data Protection Governance - This service aims to support the entity’s processes for collecting, processing, storing, and deleting of personal data while ensuring protection of the data subject’s rights on their personal information

14.   Data Governance Training and Awareness - This service aims to raise the level of awareness of the entity’s employees regarding the importance of data, and the data governance and management practices, through awareness sessions and training workshops

15.   Data Governance and Management Policies Compliance - This service aims to measure the entity’s compliance to the defined data governance and management policies, prepare compliance reports and follow up on corrective actions for cases of non-compliance as per the ‘National Data Governance and Management Compliance Assessment Model’.

 

DGM Office Organization Structure

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Governance Model

A governance model shall be established for structuring the data governance and management functions of the entity and handling its data governance related issues. The governance model includes the following three forums:

·        Data Governance Committee: The Data Governance Committee sets the strategic direction for the entity’s data governance and management program and acts as the final authority to decide on all decisions and issues related to data governance and management. It oversees the performance of the entity’s data governance and management office, approves the entity’s data management strategy, policies and processes along with obtaining sponsorship for the entity’s data governance and management program initiatives.

            o Meeting Frequency: Quarterly

 

·        Data Governance and Management Working Team: The Data Governance and Management Working Team implements the data governance and management policies and related practices through the performance of day-to-day activities across all business units within the entity.

           o Meeting Frequency: Weekly

 

 

The services performed by the Data Governance and Management Office shall be monitored and evaluated through tracking of the operational performance indicators that shall include, at minimum, the following:

·        Strategy and implementation roadmap development - Initiative completion indicator - The indicator measures the ratio of the number of initiatives completed over the number of initiatives planned as per the implementation roadmap at program level.

·        Policies and processes development and review - Policy control implementation indicator -  The indicator measures the ratio of controls linked to policies implemented over total control linked to policies approved for implementation.

·        Data catalog development and management - Data catalog development ratio indicator - This indicator measures the ratio of the number of CDEs catalogued over the total number of CDEs identified. Data catalog change indicator This indicator measures the ratio of the number change requests executed for the data catalog over the total number of change requests received.

·        Data Classification Governance - Data Classification indicator - The indicator measures the ratio of the number of data assets classified over the total number of data assets for a particular entity.

·        Data Quality Governance. Data Quality Index - This indicator measures the ratio of records that pass the DQ rules against the total number of records processed. Data Quality issue resolution index. The indicator measures the ratio of data quality issues resolved over total data quality issues reported. Resolution time indicator The indicator measures the average time taken to provide a resolution for a data quality issue

·        Data architecture governance Data architecture alignment indicator The number of architectural components implemented in alignment with the developed target data architecture.

·        Data sharing governance. Data sharing agreement adoption indicator. The indicator measures the number of data sharing requests executed through the data sharing agreements over total number of data sharing requests executed.

·        Data analytics business use case implementation. Analytics business use case implementation indicator. The indicator measures the total number of potential data analytics business use cases implemented over the total number of business use cases identified

·        Data analytics business use case implementation - Analytics business use case implementation indicator - The indicator measures the total number of potential data analytics business use cases implemented over the total number of business use cases identified

·        Reference and master data governance - Master Data Implementation Indicator - The indicator measures the number of master data objects implemented in the MDM tool over the number of master data objects planned for implementation.

·        Data monetization governance - Data Monetization implementation indicator - The indicator measures the number of opportunities implemented for revenue generation or cost optimization over the number of opportunities identified for revenue generation or cost optimization.

·        Public information request management oversight - Public information request execution time indicator - The indicator measures the average time taken to process and execute the requests for access to entity’s public information submitted by individuals

·        Personal Data Protection governance - Personal data identification indicator - The indicator measures the number of business processes reviewed for personal data identifications over the total number of business processes within the entity

·        Data governance training and awareness - Training completion index - The indicator measures the ratio of the count of training and awareness sessions held by an entity over total count of training and awareness sessions planned.

·        Data Governance and Management policies compliance - Non-compliance indicator - The indicator measures the number of cases of non-compliance observed during the internal compliance assessment with respect to National Data Governance and Management Policies.

·        Data Governance and Management process automation - Process automation indicator - The indicator measures the ratio of number of data governance and management processes automated (through adoption of data governance tool) over the total number of data governance and management processes.

 

For a detailed understanding, you can access the full guidelines here

https://www.mtcit.gov.om/ITAPortal/Data/SiteImgGallery/202511121812535/Data%20Governance%20and%20Management%20Office%20Establishment%20Guidelines_Final_ENGLISH.pdf

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