At a past meeting of The Presidents Forum, Angela Liu, President of Crispy Green, Inc., talked with members on Data Governance. Angela said this topic’s importance is driven in part by privacy, legal and ethical concerns, presenting unique risks that need to be better managed. This discussion has now come up again due to its importance.

At our meeting, we began talking about Data Governance goals, which are different depending on the industry, organization structure, type of data captured, and overall risk management practices.

However, some common goals and initiatives include improving, data quality, compliance and security, and data sharing.

Data security has become more critical for many companies after the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) passage with its new requirements for data retention and the individuals’ request to access, delete, correct, or opt-out.

The key takeaways from this meeting are first to acknowledge that an organization’s data has significant value that needs to be protected. And second, there is a disciplined, formal, centralized enterprise-wide process to manage data, it is not intended for one department only.

Good governance benefits include enhanced security, improved data quality, and operational efficiency by reducing data management and storage costs.

These are good reasons to start working on a data governance plan today.

Steve McCarthy

The Presidents Forum