Mining the Value of Data through Agile Data Governance – A Team
Agile data governance frameworks are presenting financial institutions with valuable new ways to use their data and respond swiftly to the changing demands placed upon it. They are also offering deeper insights into firms’ own operations, helping them to identify and eliminate emerging risks, shortening time to market and streamlining decision making.
While the common principles of agile data governance are still crystalising, experts are hailing its importance in helping firms mine value from data that might otherwise have lingered unused on corporate drives.
“The benefit of agile data governance is really to align to the rapid change that we’re seeing across digital transformation and being able to react to it in a much more rapid way,” says Marc Gilman, general counsel and vice president of compliance at data security specialist Theta Lake.
How agile data governance is helping firms is the subject of next week’s Data Management Insight webinar entitled “How to optimise the business value of your data using agile data governance”. The event will gather a panel of experts who will examine the fundamentals of this rapidly developing space.
David Masters, former Chief Data Officer of SGIL (UK) and Prime Services (Global) at Société Générale will be joined by Lynn Watts, Head of Data Governance at Royal London Asset Management; Peter Baumann, Chief Executive and founder of ActiveNav; and, Philip Dutton, Co-Chief Executive and co-founder of Solidatus.
Agile governance methodologies have emerged largely as a consequence of the rapid increase in the volume, types and complexity of data that firms are using and generating.
Governance structures are necessary to help ensure that managers of the data get it to the right people, in the right format at the right time. Too often, methodologies have tended to focus narrowly on protection and less so on data access. Less dynamic methodologies are being eschewed for a decentralised and responsive approach, Dutton told Data Management Insight.
“You’ve now got exponential data, exponential regulation and exponential willingness and desire to go faster – to change faster,” he says. “And because you combine all those three things together at the same time, you get a ball of complexity, which is filled with risk and whose impact is really difficult to understand and assess. And so, the whole governance space is having to shift.”
Agile principles in data governance were carried across from the software development sector, in which designers and engineers collaborate across functions to bring products to market faster. Along the way, so the theory enshrined in 2001’s “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” goes, by working in an iterative manner, teams continually improve and are able to nimbly adapt to change and challenges.
In practice, the application of these principles to data governance has taken the form of individuals in a firm becoming stakeholders in the management of its data. That involves widening access to data in order for them to review processes more regularly and adapt swiftly to changes to operations, markets and regulations, while also keeping data secure.
“That business stakeholder involvement is super, super important because the data governance process is lacklustre without it,” says Gilman.
Dutton argues that because of their novelty, agile governance methodologies have been differently implemented across companies. But they all share a common aim of tackling the growing complexity – and consequent emergence of new risks – within enterprise data.
“It’s largely about embracing the fact that today things are changing so quickly, and that governance programmes and all the policies in place need to be looked at and reviewed and revisited at least monthly, to make sure that they’re mitigating against all the threats that they’re running into on a daily basis,” says Kyle McNabb, Solution and Product Marketing Growth Leader at data manager Rocket Software.
