A recent Gresham survey of over 100 CFOs in Financial Services underlines exactly how vital a data governance strategy is for organisations contemplating digital transformation. The survey download is highly recommended reading for anyone contemplating stalled projects or developing future plans.
There are a number of key takeaways which support our own views:
- GDPR compliance feasibility is still a matter of debate. CFOs find it conflicts with other regulatory demands (e.g. PSD2);
- GDPR is irreconcilable with new tech such as blockchain, in several respects, not the least of which is that there is no way to know ‘where’ data is and therefore whether it has passed beyond approved national borders or jurisdictions;
- Business strategies struggle with tighter regulatory envelopes. This may be due to metadata-related issues where analytics relies on complete metadata descriptors and enterprise-level taxonomies, data hierarchies and term lists. It is also possible that such strategies predate data-centric approaches;
- AI/ML initiatives have ‘hit a wall’ since the advent of GDPR – those technologies require quality, certified data with governance at a granular level;
- GDPR is still a work in progress.
If you needed any more reason to invest in your data, metadata, data management or data house-keeping prior to new projects, digital transformation or ecosystem evolution, here it is!