Data governance refers to the set of laws, policies, regulations, authorities and decision-making structures that guide how enterprises collect, share and use data to inform decisions. Failure to strengthen balanced data governance not only leads to harms and infringement of rights, but curtails innovation, restricts economic transformation and undermines using data to its greatest potential with the highest rewards and lowest risks.

The recent technological advances like big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning have necessitated further tuning of data governance practices throughout global businesses. As the trend toward self-service analytics and business intelligence (BI) continues, it will become apparent that data quality and data governance will occupy critical places in the organizational data strategy framework.

With the opportunity to leverage new forms of data and analytical techniques comes significant complexity in terms of data governance. Balancing the opportunities and challenges from the digital economy requires having sound data governance frameworks.

Data is becoming the core corporate asset that will determine the success of your business. Digital transformation is on the agenda everywhere. You can only exploit your data assets and do a successful digital transformation if you are able to govern your data. 

Leaders who aim to enhance organizational performance through the use of digital technologies often have a specific tool in mind. But digital transformation should be guided by the broader business strategy.

There is no single technology that will deliver speed or innovation, as such. The best combination of tools for a given organization will vary from one vision to another.

Data-driven organizations make better decisions, acquire more customers and keep their customers longer. As a result, they drive more revenue and profits than businesses that make decisions based on speculation. Unfortunately, the inability to quickly find digital assets is a core problem that prevents many organizations from gaining a competitive advantage.

Although digital transformation will vary widely based on organization’s specific challenges and demands, there are a few constants and common themes among existing case studies and published frameworks that all business and technology leaders should consider as they embark on digital transformation. Among those are a comprehensive data governance strategy.

Although IT will play an important role in driving digital transformation strategy, the work of implementing and adapting to the massive changes that go along with digital transformation falls to everyone. For this reason, digital transformation is a people issue.

At the end of the day, the data needs to be findable and, that happens with a strong, standards-based taxonomy. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies and associated rule bases for machine-assisted indexing. Making the content findable is important to knowledge management.

Melody K. Smith

Data Harmony is an award-winning semantic suite that leverages explainable AI.

Sponsored by Data Harmony, harmonizing knowledge for a better search experience.