The challenges and benefits of good data governance
Understanding the need for data governance is one thing, but establishing and running a mature data governance program is quite another. And it is particularly difficult for a complex, legacy business, such as a telco. Executives from the Belgian telco Proximus and Cloudera joined analysts in a TM Forum webinar to discuss both the growing strategic importance of data governance and the difficulty of creating and maintaining effective programs.
02 Dec 2021
The challenges and benefits of good data governance
Understanding the need for data governance is one thing, but establishing and running a mature data governance program is quite another. And it is particularly difficult for a complex, legacy business, such as a telco. Executives from the Belgian telco Proximus and Cloudera joined analysts in a TM Forum webinar to discuss both the growing strategic importance of data governance and the difficulty of creating and maintaining effective programs.
A TM Forum member survey for the report The growing importance of data governance revealed that only 17% of communications service provider (CSPs) have a mature governance program in place.
However, “it's grown to become a strategic imperative,” according to Antonietta Mastroianni, Chief Digital & IT Officer - Proximus, speaking during the TM Forum webinar, Data Governance: Why it matters now.
“Data is really at the top of my priority because … data is the power of (the) future," said Mastroianni. "Data governance is enforcing effective data management and ... mak[ing] sure that data is fit, of the required quality, reusable and compliant with regulation and standards,” she explained.
Changing technologies, business models and customer habits will require CSPs to take data governance in hand, even if it is hard to do.
“With things like 5G and the evolution of virtualized infrastructure, the demands of things like automation and AI … the importance of that data to the business is just growing exponentially," said Anthony Behan, managing director, telecoms, media and entertainment, Cloudera. "It has to be managed. There's data everywhere, including other data and BS/ OSS, but there's data from customers from the network from Twitter, Facebook, everywhere."
One example Behan gives is the rise of distributed edge computing.
“It's going to be lots of different data sources and data sets distributed around the enterprise. And even beyond the enterprises if we think about 5G and IoT and all that sort of stuff getting to the edge and beyond. So centralizing data governance in order to mass-manage for what one client said to me was a hyper-distributed data cloud.”
Secure, accurate data will also play an important role as CSPs seek to build new business partnerships.
With an effective data governance program CSPs can hope to "lower TCO [total cost of ownership] and in particular … be a trusted digital partner… which for me is extremely important,” said Mastroianni, who explained that Proximus had moved to a centralized approach to data governance.
TM’s Forum research report, however, identifies several obstacles to good data governance, starting with data silos, and extending to a lack of skills and leadership engagement, as well as poor employee compliance with policies. TM Forum's Data Governance Guidebook provides guidance of the process and steps to implementing a data governance program.
Participants in the webinar highlighted the importance of ensuring employees are clear about the benefits of good data governance.
“A lot of data scientists that I speak to see data governance as sort of a hindrance and … an administrative function that needs to be served and gotten out of the way as quickly as possible,” said Behan.
Mastroianni agreed that data scientists “want to explore the potential and sometimes when it comes to heavy government this could be seen as a bit of a limitation.” This makes it important to spell out the benefits of data governance to all employees, which in the case of data scientists and anyone working with advanced analytic and AI, would include a clean database.
“I think the right approach is always to show the big benefit coming out of the governance and not only enforce a strict set of rules or sort of police function,” said Mastroianni.
Speakers also spelled out some of the risks of making data governance an afterthought and “waiting until the very end and .. seeing … suddenly you're going to change all the architecture because it's just not compliant or it's not got the security policies in place.”
It is also important to understand that effective data governance is an ongoing process. “It's not something that is done once and it stays there forever,” according to Mastroianni. “It's something that evolves all the time. So, it's very dynamic. And that requires a lot of attention and the right tools and also to make sure that when you exchange data and expose data it is … right.”
Watch the webinar to learn more and download the report.
However, “it's grown to become a strategic imperative,” according to Antonietta Mastroianni, Chief Digital & IT Officer - Proximus, speaking during the TM Forum webinar, Data Governance: Why it matters now.
“Data is really at the top of my priority because … data is the power of (the) future," said Mastroianni. "Data governance is enforcing effective data management and ... mak[ing] sure that data is fit, of the required quality, reusable and compliant with regulation and standards,” she explained.
Changing technologies, business models and customer habits will require CSPs to take data governance in hand, even if it is hard to do.
“With things like 5G and the evolution of virtualized infrastructure, the demands of things like automation and AI … the importance of that data to the business is just growing exponentially," said Anthony Behan, managing director, telecoms, media and entertainment, Cloudera. "It has to be managed. There's data everywhere, including other data and BS/ OSS, but there's data from customers from the network from Twitter, Facebook, everywhere."
One example Behan gives is the rise of distributed edge computing.
“It's going to be lots of different data sources and data sets distributed around the enterprise. And even beyond the enterprises if we think about 5G and IoT and all that sort of stuff getting to the edge and beyond. So centralizing data governance in order to mass-manage for what one client said to me was a hyper-distributed data cloud.”
Secure, accurate data will also play an important role as CSPs seek to build new business partnerships.
With an effective data governance program CSPs can hope to "lower TCO [total cost of ownership] and in particular … be a trusted digital partner… which for me is extremely important,” said Mastroianni, who explained that Proximus had moved to a centralized approach to data governance.
TM’s Forum research report, however, identifies several obstacles to good data governance, starting with data silos, and extending to a lack of skills and leadership engagement, as well as poor employee compliance with policies. TM Forum's Data Governance Guidebook provides guidance of the process and steps to implementing a data governance program.
Participants in the webinar highlighted the importance of ensuring employees are clear about the benefits of good data governance.
“A lot of data scientists that I speak to see data governance as sort of a hindrance and … an administrative function that needs to be served and gotten out of the way as quickly as possible,” said Behan.
Mastroianni agreed that data scientists “want to explore the potential and sometimes when it comes to heavy government this could be seen as a bit of a limitation.” This makes it important to spell out the benefits of data governance to all employees, which in the case of data scientists and anyone working with advanced analytic and AI, would include a clean database.
“I think the right approach is always to show the big benefit coming out of the governance and not only enforce a strict set of rules or sort of police function,” said Mastroianni.
Speakers also spelled out some of the risks of making data governance an afterthought and “waiting until the very end and .. seeing … suddenly you're going to change all the architecture because it's just not compliant or it's not got the security policies in place.”
It is also important to understand that effective data governance is an ongoing process. “It's not something that is done once and it stays there forever,” according to Mastroianni. “It's something that evolves all the time. So, it's very dynamic. And that requires a lot of attention and the right tools and also to make sure that when you exchange data and expose data it is … right.”
Watch the webinar to learn more and download the report.
