Data Governance Lead - Security Cooperation Data & Knowledge Management

Position Summary

The Data Governance Lead is responsible for establishing and managing the enterprise data governance framework supporting a Department of Defense (DoD) Security Cooperation platform. This role ensures that data across Security Cooperation programs—including Foreign Military Sales (FMS), Building Partner Capacity (BPC), Institutional Capacity Building (ICB), International Military Education and Training (IMET), Humanitarian Assistance, and Security Cooperation workforce development—is trusted, secure, discoverable, and actionable.

The Data Governance Lead will develop governance policies, data standards, metadata management, taxonomy, master data management, and lifecycle processes that enable secure information sharing, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, and enterprise knowledge management. Working across functional and technical teams, the incumbent will facilitate governance councils, promote data stewardship, and ensure compliance with DoD cybersecurity, records management, and data strategy requirements.

This position plays a critical role in transforming fragmented information into a strategic enterprise asset that supports decision-making, operational readiness, partner nation engagement, and institutional learning across the Security Cooperation enterprise.

• Develop and implement the enterprise Data Governance Framework for the Security Cooperation platform.
• Establish governance policies, standards, procedures, and operating models aligned with DoD data strategies.
• Lead governance activities that promote data quality, consistency, accessibility, and accountability.
• Develop governance maturity roadmaps and implementation plans.
• Facilitate cross-functional governance councils and working groups.

• Identify and establish business and technical data steward roles across Security Cooperation organizations.
• Define stewardship responsibilities and decision-making authorities.
• Coordinate stewardship activities to resolve data ownership and quality issues.
• Promote accountability for enterprise data assets.

• Develop and maintain enterprise metadata standards.
• Design and govern taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, ontologies, and tagging strategies.
• Ensure consistent classification of operational, instructional, and programmatic content.
• Support semantic search, AI-enabled discovery, and enterprise knowledge management.

• Define enterprise data quality standards and performance metrics.
• Develop processes for monitoring data completeness, consistency, validity, accuracy, and timeliness.
• Lead root cause analysis and remediation of data quality issues.
• Implement dashboards and scorecards for governance performance.

• Collaborate with Knowledge Management teams to improve discoverability and reuse of Security Cooperation knowledge.
• Develop governance processes supporting AI-enabled search and enterprise knowledge repositories.
• Standardize document classification and information architecture.
• Enable organizational learning through structured information management.

• Establish governance for master data domains, including organizations, partner nations, personnel, programs, courses, authorities, funding sources, and capability areas.
• Develop enterprise reference data standards.
• Coordinate master data synchronization across systems.

• Partner with enterprise architects and solution architects to align governance with technical architecture.
• Review solution designs to ensure compliance with governance standards.
• Support cloud-native data architectures within AWS environments.
• Ensure governance requirements are incorporated into system development life cycles.

• Prepare enterprise information assets for Generative AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics.
• Develop governance standards supporting Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.
• Ensure structured metadata supports AI search accuracy and transparency.
• Establish governance for AI-generated content where appropriate.

• Ensure compliance with the DoD Data Strategy, DoD Information Enterprise Architecture, Risk Management Framework (RMF), NIST SP 800-53, DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG), Federal Records Act, Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) requirements, and information lifecycle management policies.
• Coordinate with cybersecurity teams to ensure governance supports secure information sharing.

• Lead governance workshops with Security Cooperation stakeholders.
• Build consensus across operational, educational, technical, and leadership communities.
• Present governance recommendations to senior government leadership.
• Develop governance documentation, policies, standards, and executive briefings.

Success in this role will be…