Data Governance: The New Top Priority for Enterprises

Data governance has previously been viewed as mostly a cost center – a necessary but not very exciting component of an organization’s strategy. Now, thanks to the emergence of AI/ML- driven marketing, evolving privacy regulations, and multiple high-profile data leaks, that is no longer the case.  

Whether your enterprise is ready for it or not, the digital data collected on your sites and applications is becoming a first priority in your data governance strategy. The way this data is handled will have huge impacts on your reputation and long term customer relationships. 

Data governance can’t be left up to chance anymore. In this era of data transparency, you can no longer afford to delegate governance responsibility to your advertising, marketing, analytics, and warehousing partners via their tags and libraries. It's time to take back control of your digital customer data at the source, and treat it with the same care and diligence you’d give to any other data record proprietary to your business. The good news is, MetaRouter has the tools to help. 

Let’s take a step back and look at why this is all so important. 

The Current State.

Right now, many companies (especially outside of Europe) are not uniting digital, customer, and marketing data within the sphere of data governance. That data is handled separately, with varying processes and strategies and with often questionable security and privacy. This is a mistake that will leave them desperate and scrambling as inevitable regulatory environments and market forcing functions continue to shift. This scattershot approach leaves organizations, and their customers at risk for hacks, mishandled private data and leaked data.

Organizations who do have a more unified approach to data governance are often using a solution that requires data to come in and sit at rest before any enforcement or analysis can be done, which slows progress and makes it difficult for real-time marketing use cases to take place. 

Even organizations with a strategy for data governance are lacking in their ability to maintain security with third-party marketing platforms like Meta or X. The common practice today is to simply place the third-party tag that these organizations require and allow them to collect, store and use all of the data they’d like.

These organizations need a unified approach to data governance that starts from the time that data is collected, manages their risk and increases the performance and usefulness of their data.  

What’s Changing?

Three factors will force a change to the status quo in the coming year: 

• AI/ML Integration: As businesses embark on their AI journey, they are realizing that AI and ML applications must go hand-in-hand with mature data governance to prevent violations of data use laws and increase the quality of the outputs of their AI and ML use cases. It’s not just organizations who use AI and ML themselves who need to put up safeguards – it’s everyone. Rampant use of open-source AI and ML means that all data is up for grabs, even the data you’d rather keep to yourself. Organizations need to carefully consider their practices for each piece of data they collect and store, and put in place practices that protect them from the start. 
• ‍Regulatory Policies on the Rise: Thirty-five U.S. states have already considered or implemented data privacy regulations. To add to the tangled regulatory landscape,  California's CCPA is set to become even more stringent. The global trend is undeniable. Businesses must be prepared to monitor and adapt to evolving regulations, or they risk legal and reputational consequences.
• ‍Consumer Expectations: Consumers have become increasingly aware of the value and use of their data. They now expect brands to handle their data with the utmost integrity and respect. In a recent survey, 65% of consumers ranked the "misuse of personal data" as the top reason they would lose trust in a brand. In this era of data transparency, businesses need to prioritize data governance to meet consumer expectations and build trust.

Invest once, mitigate liability everywhere.

MetaRouter provides enterprises with a platform to not only integrate their digital customer data  with the broad landscape of vendors and partners that depend on it, but to do so in a way that is completely private, single-tenant, highly transparent, and targets liability risk at the source. 

Our customer data infrastructure (CDI) will help you create a  single private pipeline  for all your digital collection efforts, a means to enforce your compliance and security rules at the point of collection, and a viable reporting and schema enforcement suite before data is ever exposed to 3rd-parties or the public. Your data teams will be able to deliver the critical customer data your advertising, marketing, and analytics teams depend on, while complying with the important  legal, security, and infosec rigor your business demands. With MetaRouter, you can host the entirety of your downstream  digital data stack in compliance with your internal and external policies in one single investment, rather than chasing down dozens and dozens of downstream vendors and trusting them to mitigate your business’ risk for you.

It's time to take back control of your own data, and we’re here to help. 

Visit MetaRouter for Data Governance to learn more.