Data citizenship: The next stage of data governance

Successful organizations are becoming increasingly Agile, and the autonomy and empowerment that Agile brings create new, active modes of engagement. Data governance however is still very much a centralized task that only CDOs and data owners actively care about. Antonio Alvarez and Lidia Crespo outline a more engaging and active method of data governance: data citizenship.

As everything goes digital and with data being created at a massive scale, data is the asset that makes companies successful. Successful organizations are becoming increasingly Agile, and the autonomy and empowerment that Agile brings create new, active modes of engagement. Data governance however is still very much a centralized task that only CDOs and data owners actively care about. Antonio Alvarez and Lidia Crespo outline a more engaging and active method of data governance: data citizenship—a community bound by a social contract in which everyone gets value out of the big data platform and, in turn, has a responsibility to give value back to the community. Data only has value when there is knowledge to use it. Antonio and Lidia explain how to implement tools and processes to enable and encourage everyone in an organization to attach their knowledge to the data, making it available to everyone. A semantic layer in the form of a business ontology that links the data together organizes the knowledge in a logical way that can be exploited by humans and machines indistinctly. The importance of data and metadata quality, its context, and its security is also distributed so that everyone feels engaged and committed to enriching the ability of the organization to make the most of their knowledge. Antonio and Lidia call it data democracy.