Data and Information Governance Manager

Spark Trajectory Intranet and Digital Workplace Roles and Teams > This role

What does the role Data and Information Governance Manager do?

The Data and Information Governance Manager is the role most directly responsible for the quality, structure, and authority of the information assets that AI systems retrieve from. The remit covers establishing and maintaining data governance frameworks, taxonomy and metadata standards, content lifecycle governance policies, and defining what content is in scope for AI retrieval. The role predates AI governance as a discipline (rooted in data management, information architecture, knowledge management, and records management traditions) but AI retrieval has made its work a first-order risk rather than an operational maintenance concern.

The role operates primarily through policy, standards, and stewardship coordination rather than hands-on content or system management. It defines the frameworks and accountability structures that data owners, content stewards, and platform teams work within, and influences without direct authority across IT, business, and AI functions. It typically sits in IT, the Digital Workplace function, or a dedicated Data Governance team, and is frequently the role most impacted by AI deployment while being least recognised as part of the AI governance function.

Also known as

  • Data Governance Manager
  • Information Governance Manager
  • Knowledge Management Lead
  • Head of Information Architecture
  • Content Governance Lead
  • Information Asset Manager
  • Data Stewardship Manager
  • Knowledge and Information Manager
Standard prevalence

This role is pretty much always in all larger organisations

Primary responsibilties

  • Owns and maintains the data governance framework covering data quality, metadata, classification, and lifecycle management
  • Defines and governs taxonomy and controlled vocabulary standards, coordinating with data owners and content stewards to ensure coherent terminology across AI-retrievable content
  • Establishes content metadata standards including ownership fields, review dates, status labels, and sensitivity classification, and monitors compliance through stewardship networks
  • Defines the content lifecycle governance policy including review cycles, expiry mechanisms, and archival standards, with operational execution delegated to content owners
  • Sets and enforces the boundary of what content is in scope for AI retrieval, working with AI teams and platform owners to ensure retrieval systems respect the content authority hierarchy
  • Commissions and interprets corpus health monitoring covering staleness, duplication, and authority gap analysis, coordinating remediation through responsible content owners
  • Runs governance forums and working groups to review policies, standards, and exceptions, and reports on data quality and governance compliance to senior stakeholders

Related teams

We've known this role to be part of the following teams:
AI Governance Function

Skills profile

Note: This is what we documented as an exemplar. It's unlikely to always be the case and relates to a role's involvement with the delivery of digital employee experience and perhaps not everything they do. You can open this in the Skills Profile Builder if you want to customise it.

Apprentice

Limited but increasing capabilities based on learning and on-the-job experience, but guidance and mentoring is required to fulfil potential.

Practitioner

Good professional capabilities sufficient for many circumstances and roles. Able to guide and mentor apprentices.

Master

Abilities that are the best in the professional field, gained from significant experience. Able to teach and guide others in their development.
{"operational-governance":3,"stakeholder-management":2,"search-management":1,"information-architecture":1,"taxonomy-design-and-metadata-management":2,"content-management":1}

Outline job description

The Data and Information Governance Manager is the role most directly responsible for the quality, structure, and authority of the information that AI systems retrieve from. It's a role rooted in data management, information architecture, and records management traditions, but one that AI retrieval has elevated from operational maintenance to a first-order risk.

About the role

You'll operate primarily through policy, standards, and stewardship coordination rather than hands-on content or system management. Your job is to define the frameworks and accountability structures that data owners, content stewards, and platform teams work within and to make sure those frameworks are coherent, consistently applied, and fit for an environment where AI tools are surfacing organisational content directly to employees and customers.

The role typically sits in IT, the Digital Workplace function, or a dedicated Data Governance team. It is frequently the role most impacted by AI deployment while being least recognised as part of the AI governance function.

What you'll actually be doing

Much of the work is governance infrastructure: defining metadata standards, building content lifecycle policies, establishing what's in scope for AI retrieval, and running the governance forums and stewardship networks that make those standards stick in practice. You'll also be commissioning and interpreting corpus health monitoring (identifying where content is stale, duplicated, or missing authoritative sources) and coordinating remediation through the responsible content owners.

It's a role that requires credibility across a wide range of stakeholders: IT, Legal, business units, AI teams, and platform owners all need to understand and work within your frameworks.

What we're looking for

Deep experience in data governance, information management, or records management, with the ability to design frameworks that actually work in practice rather than just producing policy documents. Strong expertise in taxonomy, metadata, and classification. A growing understanding of how AI retrieval systems (RAG, Microsoft Copilot, enterprise search) use metadata and content structure is increasingly central to the role.

The ability to influence across organisational boundaries without direct authority is critical.

Typical background

Most people in this role come from data management, information science, records management, or digital workplace governance backgrounds. DAMA, CILIP, or equivalent qualifications are common. Experience in regulated sectors such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Legal, Public Sector, is frequently required.

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Errors? Disagreements? Omissions?

We have hopefully created these exemplars with thought and care. It is not the only way of looking at these roles and teams in the world, and relates specifically to the intranet and digital workplance profession. It therefore concentrates on some things and ignores others.

If you find an error, disagree wholeheartly or feel there is a glaring ommission we'd love to know.

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License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.