What Lives Between Data Privacy and Data Governance? Better Compliance

Data is powerful. It’s used by organizations to make better business decisions, streamline operations, and reduce overall operating costs. Many of today’s Fortune 1000 companies transformed their business by embarking on a digital journey that aligned data as their most valuable asset.

Of course, things that are valuable need to be protected. Data has the power to be transformative because it often contains sensitive information that could bring harm to the individuals it concerns.

Chief Privacy Officers (CPOs) face new regulatory requirements for protecting and reporting on that sensitive data, which has created an urgent need for companies to better manage their data assets in the first place. Previously unregulated organizations are enhancing their data governance programs to address this need. As part of that effort, it’s necessary for CPOs and CDOs to collaborate more efficiently to manage, protect, and report on their organizations’ data.

With the recent adoption of the General Data Protection Act (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), U.S. privacy regulations reached beyond the previously regulated sectors of finance, health, and children’s data to specify that any organization processing “personal data” or “personal information” (PI) must meet new compliance standards in their data practices—or submit to costly fines.

With data privacy under the spotlight and regulations evolving across the globe (as of this writing, 61 countries have privacy regulations in consideration), data-driven organizations are getting more strategic and forward-thinking about their data governance. Companies can no longer afford to treat each new privacy regulation as a standalone project or spend hours manually collecting and aggregating data for custom reporting on individuals. They need the right solutions to operationalize and automate their data assets at scale.

Enter data governance and the role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO). Data governance is the management of the quality and integrity of data across an organization. It ensures that there is consensus and truth in the data, and that it can be relied on to be accurate and complete for all functions in an organization.

The CDO is responsible for executing on the activities necessary for managing data and for shaping the data policies and data sharing agreements. For any organization that collects and processes customer, employee, or business-sensitive data—and wants to ensure that data remains as accurate, complete, and “true” as possible—the CDO can be the CPO’s best friend. And in just about every organization, there’s a growing need for them to work together to achieve ongoing compliance.

As things stand, companies (especially those outside of previously regulated sectors like health and finance) may have gaps in their existing data management programs. These organizations either lack historical knowledge and documentation on the full breadth of their data assets, or that data is spread out across a diverse technological landscape. Plus, the sheer amount of metadata that is generated on a daily basis can create issues in efficiently fulfilling requests (including data subject access requests)—and that can only be fixed by addressing data governance.

Properly managed and governed data can support all of the organization’s business functions, including data privacy management.