Asia to be part of data governance framework

Work will begin this year on an information governance framework, and Asia is expected to be involved in its creation, according to an IBM executive.

Steven Adler, chairman of the IBM Data Governance Council and director of IBM's data governance products, told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview that the framework will evolve via an "open forum". Organizations in Asia, he added, will be invited to be "active participants in the creation of this Framework so that Asian interests and needs are adequately addressed".

Adler observed: "Central banks in Asia have been playing a major role in helping Asian banks comply with Basel II. They play a partnership and advisory role which has been key to helping many Asian banks build advanced risk calculation and management capabilities.

"Those same Asian central banks have been keeping a keen eye on developments in data governance and I'm sure that Asian regulations will keep pace with banking best practices around the world."

The information governance framework was announced last month by the council, which comprises some 50 global institutions including Deutsche Bank, MasterCard and the World Bank. At the same time, the council released five predictions that it said will impact corporate behavior over the next four years. The key trends include data governance becoming a regulatory requirement in many countries and organizations, even possibly requiring organizations to demonstrate data governance practices in regular audits.

The council also noted that the value of data will be treated as an asset on the balance sheet, while data quality will become a technical reporting metric and key IT performance indicator.

Data governance will also move away from Board-level accountability. Board-level governance is today a statutory requirement for most publicly traded companies, whereas governance beneath the Board level is not, Adler pointed out. The predictions, he added, primarily affect the financial services industry, but the public sector would likely be impacted as well.

Adler, however, conceded that data governance is meant "to improve the odds of good decision-making by providing the best possible data quality, risk calculation methods for balanced forecasting", but will not protect organizations from committing bad decisions.

"People will still make mistakes. [The] best case scenario is that data governance helps people learn from those mistakes and steer future decision-making more dynamically."