Data governance will shine in the Data Economy

Opportunity versus risk continuum

Data usage and governance today is driven by the internal needs of the organization: regulatory compliance, strategy setting and CRM—all you would expect when data is an internal asset. Today's governance as a consequence is oriented around quality, cost minimization and security/privacy controls—all "single dimension values" where more is better.

The data economy will have a profound impact on how firms view and value their data as the sources, uses, customers of the data and value they seek from it expand. Data governance will shift along with the firm's data economy mindset. While quality, cost and control will continue to be important, added to that will be a continuous management across the opportunity versus risk continuum: the opportunities unveiled by combining external and internal data, higher and lower quality data, and real-time and post-processed data to allow companies to predict and respond to customer shifts. Those same combinations also expose a company to risks, such as reputational risks from unanticipated marketing campaign side effects.

To really become mature, data governance should turn on data risks, decomposing those risks around collection, usage and dissemination into business risks. The data governance should mature by rolling into a broader corporate governance, risks and compliance practice.