Data & AI Governance Lead

Job Responsibilities

Your responsibilities will be:

• Chair and facilitate the L3 Data & AI Governance Working Group, including bi-weekly full-group sessions and coordination of seven independent domain governance meetings across Finance, Sales, Operations, Procurement, Project Management, Product Engineering, and HR.
• Own and maintain the enterprise KPI registry — ensuring every metric has a single definition, data source, owner, and target applied consistently across all SBGs. Eliminate the current state where the same KPI is calculated differently.
• Collaborate with domain stewards, providing direction, accountability, documentation standards, and escalation support. Ensure domain-level consensus before any recommendation reaches the L2 Governance Committee.
• Own and produce the monthly governance compliance scorecard and present it to the L2 Governance Committee as the operational voice of the Working Group.
• Serve as the primary triage point for all governance escalations, resolving disputes at the lowest possible level before they reach the L2 Committee.
• Maintain master data standards across Customer, Vendor, Product / Item, Project, and Employee / Workforce domains, coordinating with domain stewards and the Data Platform team on golden record workflows and CRM–ERP alignment.
• Manage governance activation as a structured program: define milestones, track progress, identify risks and dependencies, and report status to L2 monthly and L1 quarterly.
• Develop and maintain the governance calendar, meeting cadences, agenda templates, escalation protocols, RACI documentation, and decision logs for the Working Group.
• Manage interdependencies between governance activation and Data Platform Modernization program, ensuring KPI standards and master data rules are sequenced correctly against Fabric platform delivery milestones.
• Track and manage the D365 migration wave governance schedule, ensuring data quality gates are reviewed before each go-live and that migration decisions are evaluated against master data standards.
• Build and maintain a governance maturity roadmap, with measurable milestones from framework activation through to embedded enterprise practice.
• Design and execute a structured change management plan for governance activation, applying recognized methodology (Prosci or equivalent) to address the specific adoption challenges identified in CECO's current state assessment — entrenched SBG autonomy, uneven data literacy, and previous governance efforts.
• Identify and map resistance patterns by domain and SBG, developing tailored engagement strategies for stakeholders with differing levels of governance maturity and data literacy.
• Design and execute a stakeholder communication plan that keeps domain owners, SBG Presidents, and the L2/L1 governance bodies informed, engaged, and accountable throughout the activation journey.
• Build domain steward capability through structured onboarding, coaching, and training by ensuring stewards understand not just their responsibilities but the business rationale behind each governance decision.
• Measure adoption and behavioral change alongside compliance by tracking leading indicators (steward engagement, definition adoption rates, escalation volumes) as well as lagging indicators (scorecard compliance, KPI consistency).
• Operate as a business-facing partner engaging Finance, Operations, Sales, PMO, and HR leads at a level of domain fluency that earns credibility. Governance decisions must be grounded in business reality, not theoretical best practice.
• Drive KPI standardization across SBGs through structured facilitation by identifying root causes of definitional disagreements, brokering durable resolutions, and ensuring alignment is documented and ratified before implementation.
• Handle pushback from domain stakeholders and SBG representatives constructively and with composure. Maintain governance standards without creating adversarial relationships by sustaining momentum even when progress is resisted.
• Build the case for governance adoption through demonstrated business outcomes: fewer reconciliation cycles, more reliable reporting, faster decision-making. Win adoption through value, not enforcement.
• Partner with the Data Platform and Data Engineering teams to ensure KPI standards and master data rules are correctly implemented in the Microsoft Fabric medallion architecture.
• Support financial data integrity monitoring in coordination with the Finance domain steward.
• Monitor Power BI dataset certification and reporting standards in partnership with the PBI COE Lead, preventing data model fragmentation from re-emerging at the consumption layer.
• Leverage Microsoft Purview to enforce data classification, lineage, and policy management standards across the enterprise data estate.
• Author, maintain, and own the enterprise Data and AI Policy Library — covering data classification standards, data quality requirements, AI use case governance, data access and security policies, data retention and lineage requirements, master data management standards, and acceptable use of AI tools across CECO.
• Manage the full policy lifecycle end-to-end: draft policy with domain steward input → stakeholder review → Legal and Security sign-off → L2 Governance Committee approval → publication → enterprise communication → enforcement monitoring → scheduled review and update.
• Define and enforce the AI use case intake, classification, and approval process — establishing a structured mechanism that prevents ungoverned AI tools from entering production without documented risk assessment and L2 approval. Maintain the approved AI tools registry.
• Establish AI risk levels and guardrails in collaboration with Legal and Security, ensuring CECO's AI adoption is governed, traceable, and compliant with evolving regulatory and contractual standards across all SBGs and international entities.
• Publish all Data and AI policies in an accessible enterprise format (SharePoint or Microsoft Purview policy store) with version control, effective dates, owner tracking, and review schedules. Ensure every policy is discoverable by the employees it governs.
• Monitor policy compliance as part of the monthly governance scorecard. Identify and escalate violations through the established governance framework. Track policy adoption rates by domain and SBG as a leading indicator of governance maturity.
• Proactively update the policy library in response to regulatory changes (data privacy laws, emerging AI regulation), technology changes (new tools, platform migrations, D365 expansion), and business changes (acquisitions, new SBGs, new commercial models).
• Ensure all Data and AI policies align with CECO's legal, contractual, and regulatory obligations, coordinating with Legal and Security representatives on the L2 Governance Committee before any policy is finalized or published.