Data governance is the set of policies and processes that organizations put in place to manage and protect their data and ensure compliance with data security and privacy laws. Any modern data governance program has to account for spreadsheets. In most organizations, spreadsheets are the most used data and analytics tool, contain sensitive data, and are used by all levels of technical ability.
Traditional spreadsheet apps like Excel and Google Sheets present a number of challenges for data governance. There is a natural tension between letting employees across an organization access, transform, and share data in a spreadsheet application and ensuring sound data governance policies. Row Zero offers a solution. Row Zero is a next-gen spreadsheet built for big data and enterprise data governance, letting data managers ensure good data governance while empowering their organization with a powerful cloud-based spreadsheet.
To explore spreadsheet governance best practices, risks, and how to get started, skip to specific sections below or continue reading for the full guide.
- What is data governance?
- What is spreadsheet governance?
- Why is spreadsheet governance important?
- 3 common ways orgs fail at spreadsheet governance
- The costs of bad spreadsheet data governance
- 5 steps to improve spreadsheet governance in your org
- How Row Zero can play a critical role in data governance
- Implementing data governance in spreadsheets
- Conclusion
What is data governance?
Data governance is the collection of policies, standards, and processes that organizations establish to maximize the value and efficacy of their data while minimizing risks of misuse or non-compliance with laws and regulations. The goal of data governance is to ensure that data is accurate, secure, consistent, and used effectively across an organization. Data governance covers the lifecycle of data, from data creation to data disposal. An effective data governance program also clearly assigns roles and responsibilities for data stewardship.
Key aspects of data governance include:
- Data Quality: Ensuring data is accurate, complete, and reliable for decision-making.
- Data Security: Protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access and breaches.
- Data Privacy: Ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA regarding personal information.
- Data Ownership: Defining who is responsible for specific data sets and ensuring accountability.
- Data Accessibility: Making sure the right people have access to the right data at the right time.
- Data Compliance: Ensuring data practices align with legal and industry standards, as well as the data governance program established by the organization itself.
Good data governance enables organizations to empower teams to easily work with the data and tools they need while minimizing risks related to misuse, accidents, bugs, or non-compliance with laws and regulations.
What is spreadsheet governance?
In most organizations, spreadsheets play a critical role in business operations and are used widely. This makes spreadsheets an important consideration for data governance policies. Spreadsheet governance refers to the framework of policies, practices, and standards that ensure data within spreadsheets is accurate, consistent, and secure. This involves managing how spreadsheets are created, maintained, and shared to ensure data integrity, minimize risks, and enhance collaboration. It also includes processes for regularly retiring and deleting old spreadsheet files.
Critically, spreadsheet data governance is NOT just about restricting access to data or limiting spreadsheet usage. It's also about empowering teams with the data they need in an easily accessible and usable tool (like a spreadsheet) and streamlining data management so that all teams use the same accurate "source of truth" data and data definitions.
Why is spreadsheet data governance important?
Spreadsheets play an important role in most organizations. They are widely used and often contain sensitive data or power a core workflow, process, or report. Inaccurate data can lead to bad decision making and errors. Unsecure data can lead to data privacy and security breaches. Without a proactive plan, typical spreadsheet usage can represent a common vulnerability in an org’s broader data governance, security, and regulatory compliance. Effective data governance helps ensure that spreadsheets are accurate, auditable, and secure.
3 Common Ways Orgs Fail at Spreadsheet Governance
1 - The foundational failure:
The typical data stack where employees can locally store Excel files on their machine and download CSVs of customer data out of cloud software services like CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.), marketing software (Braze, Mailchimp, etc.), accounting/ERP software (Netsuite, Quickbooks, etc.), and BI tools (Tableau, Looker, etc.) fails on three fronts: data security, regulatory compliance, and data integrity and efficacy. 
If sensitive data lives in dozens of cloud software programs and can easily leak out of any of them by exporting to CSV, your data governance program is flawed at a foundational level. Many companies check the big data box by building out a data warehouse and investing in a fancy BI tool, but then still fail at disabling export permissions from these services. If employees can download CSVs of sensitive data from anything in your tech stack, then you have a data governance and security vulnerability.
2 - The workarounds for large datasets or file formats
Several of the security risks with Excel and Google Sheets are related to their data size limits. The Excel row limit is 1,048,576 rows, which is fairly small for today's big data workplace. Google Sheets has a similar data size limit. In practice, Google Sheets and Excel slow down or crash well before these limits. Additionally, Excel and Google Sheets do not natively support common big data file formats like parquet files and compressed formats like .gz files. 
As a result, employees find workarounds out of necessity. To open big files, employees split their datasets into smaller subsets, which invites a range of potential errors and integrity issues, or they go to a random unauthorized website that opens or splits large CSV files and upload your enterprise data. Similarly, to open and edit parquet files or extract .gz files, employees go to random file reader websites or download 3rd party software. These behaviors can all lead to data governance violations and issues with security and privacy compliance.
3 - Failing basic data governance best practices
At many organizations, spreadsheets have gotten a free pass when it comes to data governance due to their widespread use and traditional lack of good alternatives. Here are a few basic failures:
- Lack of user training: Users who are not properly trained may introduce errors or vulnerabilities or fail to follow established governance practices. At the very least, employees should be trained on the risks of 1) uploading data to unauthorized 3rd party websites, 2) downloading/saving data to their machine, and 3) emailing attachments with sensitive data.
- Inadequate access controls: To prevent unauthorized data usage and leakage, data managers should set view, edit, sharing, and download permissions across their data stack.
- No backup or recovery plans: Failing to back up critical spreadsheets can result in data loss during unexpected events like system crashes. This is especially true when working with large files or complicated models that may cause Excel or Google Sheets to crash.
- Poor version control: Allowing multiple versions of the same spreadsheet to exist can lead to confusion, errors, and no clear source of truth.
- Inconsistent data entry: Different users inputting data without standardized formats, checks, or workflows can lead to inconsistencies and duplicate data.
- No monitoring of changes: Without tracking changes, it’s difficult to audit who made edits or why data discrepancies occur.
- No plans or processes to delete data: Failure to delete data is a common violation of data privacy and security laws. Without a regular process for deleting data, files with sensitive data can exist unnecessarily for many years past their use case.
Unfortunately, this is just scratching the surface of common data governance violations in spreadsheets.
The Costs of Bad Spreadsheet Data Governance
Given the widespread usage of spreadsheets, inadequate or poor data governance policies can have a significant negative impact on your business. Poor spreadsheet data governance can lead to:
- Inaccurate decision-making: Errors in data or formula calculations can result in costly business decisions.
- Data breaches: Lack of proper access controls or encryption can expose sensitive data to unauthorized parties.
- Regulatory non-compliance: Many industries and geographies require data to be managed according to specific standards. Failing to comply can result in hefty fines.
- Operational inefficiencies: Poorly managed spreadsheets and data flow can lead to duplication of effort, version control issues, and lost productivity.
- Employee dissatisfaction and lack of trust: When data governance policies make it hard for employees to get the data they need to do their job, it creates a frustrating work environment.
- Brand, customer, and revenue loss: Any of the above issues can have real impacts on your brand, your customers, and your bottom line.
5 Steps to Improve Spreadsheet Governance in Your Org
1 - Run basic data governance training across your teams
Countering a general lack of awareness of best practices is a great place to start. As mentioned above, a simple place to start is to train employees on the risks of 1) uploading data to unauthorized websites, 2) downloading/saving data to their local machine, and 3) emailing attachments with sensitive data. It's important that your data governance policies and training are not just a list of "NO, NO, NO". Offer solutions for the common data governance pitfalls:
- Working with large files
- Saving and downloading files
- Where to get your data from
- Sharing files internally and externally
- How to request authorization to import data to new vendors
2 - Define access controls
Assign permissions to users based on their roles. Limit who can view, edit, and export specific data to minimize errors and protect sensitive information. A simple place to start is setting default permissions that are read-only and setting view/edit/share permissions or protecting cells and sheets on the important spreadsheets in your org. Eventually you'll want to define access controls across your entire tech stack to prevent unauthorized access or ungoverned downloads from platforms like Salesforce, Netsuite, Hubspot, Quickbooks, etc.
3 - Create a versioning system and standardize naming conventions
Always maintain a master file and establish a process for version control to avoid data duplication and loss of information. Use consistent file names, sheet names, and column headers to avoid confusion and ensure clarity.
4 - Assign data owners and responsibilities
Like anything else, it's important to clearly define owners and responsibilities within your data governance program. Three key responsibilities should include:
- Owning, maintaining, and improving your data governance program
- Periodic data audits to catch and correct any data leakage, discrepancies, or errors
- Developing a process for deleting data and old files and ensuring adoption
5 - Make the secure path the easy path
If it's easier for employees to get the data they need out of Salesforce, Netsuite, etc, they will download it from there rather than from your data warehouse. Your north star should be making your "source of truth" data the default and easiest way users access data. Ideally, the tool they use (i.e. spreadsheet) directly connects to the source data and automatically refreshes, so end users have to do little or no work to get the data they need. Once you've made it possible for employees to easily access the data they need from your core "source of truth" data, then consider proactively disabling export permissions in all of the 3rd party software solutions in your tech stack. This is a big step towards eliminating ungoverned downloads, locally stored data files, and data leakage.
How Row Zero can play a critical role in data governance
Ultimately you may need to consider alternatives to Excel and Google Sheets to fully implement good data governance practices. For teams that want to prioritize security, data governance, and big data power, Row Zero is a great replacement for Excel and Google Sheets. With Row Zero, your spreadsheets connect directly to your data sources and automatically refresh with the latest data. Your data never leaves the cloud. Row Zero also avoids the workarounds that plague Excel and Google Sheets. Row Zero supports billion row datasets (1,000x larger than Excel's limits) and seamlessly opens large file formats like parquet and compressed file formats like .gz., so employees have no need to wander off in search of unauthorized workarounds. Row Zero spreadsheets are SOC2 and HIPAA compliant, support single sign-on, inherit the row level security from your data warehouse, and offer advanced data access controls. Read our full list of 10 ways Row Zero improves spreadsheet data governance or watch our 2 min Row Zero Overview video below.
Implementing Data Governance in Spreadsheets
Implementing a good data governance program for spreadsheets can seem daunting, but you can start simple and improve over time.
- Assess the current state: Understand how your organization uses spreadsheets and identify common risks.
- Identify key stakeholders: Include cross-functional team members who frequently use spreadsheets in the governance process. These employees are not only sources of feedback. They're also your test subjects for trying new tools or processes and are also your champions for gaining widespread adoption cross-functionally.
- Develop a data governance policy: Create a clear policy that outlines roles, responsibilities, and guidelines for managing data and spreadsheets.
- Conduct listening and training sessions: Ensure all users are familiar with best practices and the organization’s data governance policy. Remember, don't make it exclusively "No, No, No". Offer solutions and listen to feedback. The goal isn't to prevent spreadsheet usage. It's to improve the effectiveness and security of spreadsheets in your org.
- Create a continuous improvement plan: Data governance is an ongoing process. Monitor spreadsheet usage and regularly review and improve your governance practices to adapt to new challenges.
Conclusion
Spreadsheet data governance is crucial for ensuring the accuracy, security, and integrity of data within your organization. By implementing the right policies and best practices, you can minimize risks, improve decision-making, and comply with industry regulations. Start small and stay consistent, but be open to new tools and approaches to ensure success. If you're serious about data governance, explore Row Zero as a core solution within your data governance framework. You can try Row Zero for free or request a demo to learn more.