What is the difference between data governance and information governance?

Data governance and information governance overlap, but they operate at different scopes and with different emphases.

Data governance

Data governance focuses on data — typically the structured data in databases, warehouses, and applications. Its concerns are data quality, definitions, ownership, lineage, and management: making sure data is accurate, consistent, well-defined, and usable for operations and analytics. It answers questions like “what does this field mean, who owns it, and can we trust it?”

Information governance

Information governance (IG) is broader. It covers all of an organization’s information — structured data and unstructured content like documents, email, and records — and adds a strong emphasis on risk, compliance, retention, privacy, security, and e-discovery. IG asks how the organization makes accountable decisions about information across its whole life so that records management, privacy, security, and legal obligations all align.

How they relate

The simplest way to see it:

• Data governance is largely about making data valuable and reliable (a quality and usability focus).
• Information governance is about managing information as both an asset and a liability (a risk, compliance, and lifecycle focus) across all content types.

They’re complementary. A mature organization runs both: data governance keeps its structured data trustworthy and useful, while information governance ensures all its information — including the records buried in documents, email, and chat — is retained, protected, and disposed of appropriately. Records management sits within information governance; data governance sits alongside it. The two increasingly converge as organizations try to govern everything they hold under one coherent framework.