Data As Capital: The Crucial Role Of Governance In Harnessing Information For Corporate Value In AI era

Did you know that "Governance" has been one of the most fascinating corporate themes for several decades? It's an intriguing topic that has captured the attention of practitioners and consumers worldwide, and it continues to be an area of active exploration and debate to generate value. Value is perceived by different people in different ways. Corporate Governance defines value by balancing the interests of various stakeholders within a company. Since the 1970s, it has been widely recognized that investing in information and data can result in optimal economies of scale. Corporations can unlock new growth and efficiency opportunities by sharing or purchasing data at reasonable costs. In today's digital world, data is the lifeblood of organizations. Businesses must have a practical corporate governance framework to safeguard this valuable asset. Organizations must implement procedures to assess, direct, monitor, and protect data and infrastructure to generate value. Data governance has become a significant contributor to corporate governance.

 A sound Data Governance Framework should align with Corporate Governance objectives, which aim to maintain and strengthen market integrity and economic performance. Effective risk management positively influences corporate governance. This interrelation of influence, in the Indian Banking Sector, in particular, has been proven earlier. Integrating data risk into the overall risk management framework can improve data governance. Although organizations often prioritize the value of data, incorporating risk management principles can help determine the effectiveness of the data control environment.

Corporate Governance faces opportunities and challenges as big data and cloud platforms digitize and process large-scale data in firms. Data can be a powerful source of Business Insights. The pandemic has triggered a wave of digital transformation, intensifying firms' need for data digitization and accountability. As a result, data availability within firms has increased, becoming a strategic asset for driving a firm's valuation over time. By collecting and analyzing data from internal and external sources, corporations can better understand their markets and internal environment and use this knowledge to transform their business models. Effective Data Governance is critical in enabling firms to harness the full potential of data and develop their sensing capabilities, to drive profitable growth.

Corporate Governance emphasizes responsibility, transparency, accountability, and power distribution within an organization to improve long-term financial viability, promote ethical conduct and responsibility, and protect shareholder rights. Further, industry bodies state the board of directors is the central governance mechanism in corporations. Therefore, the board of directors is entrusted with exercising critical judgement in determining the company's goals and strategy, setting policies for achieving those goals and monitoring progress.

Data governance refers to assigning roles, decision-making rights, and responsibilities to an organization's data assets. It also involves supervising data management activities to ensure that data ownership and policies are adhered to in the organization. The focus is on standardizing data operations and related roles, responsibilities and accountabilities. Additionally, Data Governance brings professionalism to managing data more efficiently, which is often not formalized in small and medium enterprises. Governing data can be achieved through change management activities that influence continuous organizational development.

The CXOs can be particularly interested in the parallel evolution of data governance and corporate governance in organizations about the value preservation and sustainability of organizations in generating long-term value. Formalizing data management through data governance can increase transparency, accountability, responsibility, independence, integrity and fairness when implementing corporate governance of data. The alignment of the four constructs of structure, process, accountability, and critical performance of an inter-organizational data governance domain to corporate governance principles creates a well-governed data ecosystem. An internal corporate data governance mechanism can be the quality of data used for financial reporting on manager compensation as an internal governance mechanism and the corporate takeover market as an external governance mechanism, which makes data governance influence firms' performance. As the data governance function is formalized, a structured framework is published to assess and improve data management practices. The critical dimensions that can be included in active management are data integration and interoperability, data architecture and modelling, data operations and platforms, data privacy and security, data quality and master data management, metadata and data catalogues, data analytics and business intelligence, and data literacy. It's essential to prioritize specific dimensions to get things done efficiently. After all, we all have limited time and resources.

Governing data as an enterprise asset should start from the moment data is acquired and actively managed until it is either deleted or archived. According to technology consultant Ravikumar Joghee, companies can have a competitive advantage by adopting data governance early on, starting with the collection and thereby with active management of customer and financial data. For companies focusing on digital transformation, adopting standards like ISO 8000 can help establish an objective validation of the foundations for digital transformation by culture and contingency factors.

Tejasvi Addagada is a digital and data leader assisting Fortune 500 firms. He is one of the earliest data officers and data protection officers in the financial services. Tejasvi helps to build and optimize data management, engineering and governance solutions tailored to the culture of organizations. He provides a wide range of services including data strategy, risk management, app service rationalization, digital transformation, and process excellence.