Achieving the right balance for effective data governance

IT wasn't that long ago that "in 2004 ... Facebook didn't even exist, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, "applications" were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error", wrote Thomas Friedman in his best-seller book Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.

And of course, there was no iPhone until 2007, the inflection point when data started to explode. If you add Moore's Law (which postulates that computing power doubles once every two years) into the equation, then data has grown big and is now the new currency of the digital economy. Not bitcoin.

Companies collect and hoard an enormous amount of data, and through data analytics, have mined data for insights and sentiment, creating more data about data, or metadata. "Our social media experiences are designed in a way that favours broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations" - the social media revolution has contributed to the data explosion by adding fake news, public sentiment, WhatsApp messages, carefully curated online personas and emoticons to the plethora of data that's being generated.