Expert Interview on Data Governance: Core Domains, Challenges, and Future Trends

The article presents an interview conducted by DataFun with three data‑governance experts—Hu Xinglong (Tencent), Wang Huixiang (ByteDance), and Liu Tianyuan (Alibaba)—who share insights on the core areas, current status, challenges, and future directions of data governance.

Governance Process : Define measurable goals, build a governance team with business and leadership support, design the governance path, and iterate periodically.

Core Domains :

Metadata : Now both a governance tool and a target; essential for understanding data issues, locating data, and evaluating governance outcomes.

Data Lineage : Complex and hard to achieve full coverage; accuracy and scalability are major challenges, with sampling and multi‑engine support needed.

Metric System : Issues include inconsistent metric definitions and latency; unified metric services are emerging to standardize metrics.

Data Quality : Focuses on timeliness, completeness, accuracy, compliance, consistency, and duplication; moving toward intelligent, AI‑assisted quality monitoring.

Data Security : Covers classification, auditing, protection, sharing, authentication, and encryption; trends include linking classification with lineage, full‑link analysis, and privacy‑preserving computation.

Challenges & Trends : Unified standards are difficult due to diverse business needs; distributed autonomous governance, DataOps/AIOps, and Data Fabrics are proposed to modularize and automate governance tasks, leveraging AI for prediction and automation.

The interview also mentions the upcoming 2023 Data Governance Online Summit, which will cover topics such as data security, privacy compliance, advanced governance practices, and provide resources like a professional data‑governance knowledge map.