It’s a New, Challenging World for Data Governance
Data governance strategy is rapidly shifting from the defense to the offense.
For decades, data governance efforts have focused on compliance and security. While these two sectors remain essential, a growing number of enterprises are beginning to place user access on an equal, or nearly equal, footing.
Today’s enterprises are increasingly data-driven, and data governance — along with its compliance and security aspects — needs to be flexible enough to allow data to be easily accessed by the people who need to work with it to solve business problems, drive new revenue, create value, and even monetize the data itself.
“Data governance policies are traditionally thought of as the external regulations and internal standards and requirements that must be complied with,” observes Harald Smith, director of product management at data software specialist Syncsort. Yet many enterprises are now beginning to embrace a broader view. “Data governance policies [now] define the targets you wish to achieve in how your employees access, assess, utilize, and report on data usage,” Smith says. “Providing a clear, consistent policy-based message that is communicated equally to all employees helps ensure they understand the framework for their use of data.”
Data governance has, traditionally, struggled to meet the compromises needed to serve business needs while remaining rigid enough to enforce a centrally managed data governance policy. “New platforms and solutions using artificial intelligence now allow for more flexibility in their data model layers, which translates to some tolerance in policies that allow business lines to comply with the essence of data governance policies while rationing the flexibility needed to adapt to the ‘new normal’ pace of doing business in highly competitive markets,” says Katrin Ribant, CSO and co-founder of Datorama, a marketing analytics solutions provider.
In the past, most data governance was focused on how data should be backed up or archived, making sure it was protected and that it adhered to data retention laws. “Now we see a shift in data governance as it puts more focus on how data is accessed and used in daily operations,” says Ashok Reddy, general manager of mainframe at system software provider CA Technologies. “The reason for this shift is the increase in privacy regulations and the rise in very large data breaches than have significant financial impact.”
Access control, data retention and other governance policies are all becoming more collaborative. “As more stakeholders, from IT managers to end users and partners are working with data, policies are changing to reflect the needs that each of these audiences requires,” says Bennett Malbon, CTO at Novaseek Research, a life sciences IT company. “At the same time, we’re also finding that healthcare organizations are finding new ways to use the information they have to improve the patient experience, streamline their workflows and drive new revenue.
Data governance policies are changing from pure-play centralized hub-and-spoke to decentralized business-driven solutions, while enabling business technology to control the flow and integration, says Joseph Coniker, technology solutions principal and national business analytics practice leader at professional services firm Grant Thornton. “Data needs to be available to the right people at the right time for them to take action on any device or browser,” he notes.
Security typically must balance risk against convenience, and data is no exception. “Data can be made more accessible if it is properly understood and techniques, rules and behaviors are enforced around its use,” Reddy says. For example, requiring certain types of sensitive data to be masked or entire datasets to be encrypted along with restrictions on data use.
