What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organization and on the industry as a whole?
-
An increasing number and complexity of regulations, in part due to AI developments.
-
An increase in technical debt as the rapid evolution of technology inspires companies to chase the newest advances, thereby increasing the complexity of the technology stack.
-
A need to focus more on human behaviors (to mitigate risk from accidental misuse of data) and a need to increase (and mandate a minimum level of) data literacy for all employees.
-
A push to mitigate bias with increased diversity of those engaged in AI development.
-
A renewed effort to connect data governance to the bottom line, as the newest technological advancements translate into higher investment needs around human capital and model development.
Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?
The core of my vision is to promote a data-driven culture where every employee is expected to have a minimum level of data literacy. This ensures that our efforts to be defensible and leverage data for competitive advantage are not in vain. As the speed of technological change increases, the lack of enforced data literacy exposes organizations to increased losses from fines, reputational harms and intellectual property theft. We must begin with an expectation that all leaders are data literate at the top of our organizations. Leaders must be engaged in promoting a data literate culture, actively prioritizing engagement in their departments and teams on initiatives that unleash the power of their data and be data literate themselves. Executive-level data literacy protects organizations from spinning through hype cycles, over-investing in shiny objects that may ultimately deliver little-to-no ROI.
Bold comprehensive strategies can be deployed successfully only through a data-literate organization, starting from the top. We no longer can depend on the heroic efforts of a few to drive organizational change. Instead, companies must adopt and emphasize our collective accountability and responsibility for a data-driven culture – where data is an asset to all.
A key enabler of this strategy is treating data as a product and governance as a co-created service that includes both governance experts and in-the-business network of data trustees, data stewards, and data custodians. Through this enablement, leaders can activate data strategies across multiple domains and tackle multiple challenges and opportunities concurrently.
