What principle ensures data quality across systems?

• A. Data privacy only
• B. Data destruction
• C. Data silos
• D. Data governance ensures data integrity and consistent data across systems.

Answer: (D)

Data governance is the framework that ensures data quality and consistency across systems. It sets the policies, standards, metadata, and roles—such as data owners and stewards—that define what data means, how it’s collected, stored, and updated, and who is accountable. By establishing common definitions and quality rules, governance keeps data across different applications aligned, enabling accuracy, completeness, and timeliness and providing data lineage to trace data from source to use. Practices like master data management and data cleansing are driven by governance to reconcile records across systems and prevent discrepancies. While data privacy and data destruction cover protection and disposal, they don’t by themselves ensure cross-system data quality. Data silos reflect a lack of governance and typically lead to inconsistent data. Therefore, governance is the principle that guarantees data integrity and consistency across systems.