Good data governance is just as important as having good data

Data now rules our lives. But when data is of poor quality and/or not handled properly, both businesses and consumers can suffer. This makes good data governance of the utmost importance for financial institutions. Ultimately, good data governance should have the goal of achieving and maintaining coherence and consistency across all data assets. To accomplish this, financial institutions should:

  • Assess all the data types they use, with an eye toward building a quality assessment, management and monitoring system that collects, stores, secures and utilizes all data appropriately
  • Assess potential data management systems, given consideration not just to the data but also to data users and their reasons for needing the data
  • Adopt an institutional culture of good data governance that understands the importance of data
  • Evaluate data and data systems regularly to ensure data (and its processing mechanism) retains its value