NDMO (National Data Management Office)

The National Data Management Office (NDMO) is the Kingdom's national regulator for data management and personal data protection, operating under the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA). Its best-known instrument is its national data management and personal data protection framework: 15 domains, 77 controls, and 191 specifications that government entities — and entities handling government data — are expected to implement and report against.

The domains cover the full discipline of data management, including data governance, data catalog and metadata, data quality, data classification, reference and master data, data sharing and interoperability, open data, and personal data protection. Each control breaks down into measurable specifications, which is what makes the framework auditable rather than aspirational.

For a Saudi Data Management Office, the NDMO framework is effectively the job description. Establishing the DMO itself is one of the framework's early governance requirements, and most controls translate directly into operational artifacts: a populated data catalog, a business glossary, documented data owners and stewards, classification labels applied to datasets, quality rules with monitored results, and lineage that evidences how data moves. Organizations that treat these artifacts as living systems — rather than documents prepared shortly before an assessment — find that compliance scores follow naturally from day-to-day operations.