2022 Trends in Data Governance: Operational Capabilities Posted on : Nov 27 - 2021

For organizations everywhere—regardless of industry, size, or area of focus—data governance has reached a critical inflection point. It has long been established as a vital area of risk management predicated on achieving regulatory compliance, maintaining data privacy, and ensuring ongoing sustainability of data as an enterprise asset.

Today, however, it’s bounding beyond its risk management capabilities to boldly enter the arena of operations as one of the most viable constructs for either determining or influencing data-driven action. Moreover, recent developments have enabled it to do so dynamically, almost instantly, and potentially with as much sway as the downstream analytics and resulting decision-making that inevitably follows.

“One of the strong themes for Gartner is the idea of active metadata,” TopQuadrant CEO Irene Polikoff acknowledged. “One aspect of that is it’s directly actionable; it’s actually used in real time by operational systems to do various things.”

The operational functionality data governance will deliver in 2022 and beyond pertains to metadata management, data modeling, data stewardship, machine learning and Artificial intelligence, and various other components.

Its transition from a primarily static, passive set of principles and protocols to real-time applicability for a range of use cases producing business value naturally supports what is swiftly becoming a data economy in which firms are “moving towards a data marketplace,” added Purnima Kuchikulla, Privacera Director of Customer Success.

Operational Data Modeling

Some of the most meaningful operational action derived from data governance stems from data modeling. The interchange of data between varying systems as part of a collective data fabric is more indispensable than ever, with more organizations adopting this data management approach. Highly expressive data models with clear semantics and taxonomies can leverage machine intelligence to infer how the various schemas of different data systems can be blended for what TopQuadrant CTO Ralph Hodgson called frictionless integration. “You have similar information in different systems and the governance solution holds mappings between how it’s expressed in these different systems,” Polikoff explained. “You can involve the governance solution in real-time when you need to communicate between those systems.” View More