Facebook, i.e. Meta, has already been fined many times in Europe. On this occasion, the €390 million fine is due to its way of seeking permission to collect data from its users and use it to display personalized advertising after the entry into force of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). (EU). The fine comes on top of another fine imposed last November for another €265m for privacy breaches exposed the data of hundreds of millions of users of the social network.
While it’s impossible to know whether the company chose to break the rules on purpose, or whether it was simply unaware of the legal problems it could face, it’s clear that Meta has a big problem with its data management. “Data governance is a methodology that defines the policies, procedures and principles that need to be established the rules for what to do with the data and to monitor and ensure that it is done correctly throughout the organization,” explains Mariano Minoli, director of data and analytics at Hiberus.
Whether during collection, storage, processing, analysis or access, the information that each company handles about its clients must comply with different rules that change depending on geographic location and time, as happened in the EU when the RGPD entered into validity. mandatory phase in 2018 However, regulation is not the only relevant factor in defining and managing a good data management strategy, because “its key purpose is to get as much value as possible of them,” adds Minoli.
Who has not come across two databases of users, in one of which the classification starts with the first name and continues with the last name, and in the other it is just the opposite? “One of the big problems in organizations is sharing all the data. Although they are united in the same warehouse, Data governance is that although the data is different, it all meets the same requirements. For example, the NIF of a person who registers in the database must have the same format, whether with a letter at the beginning or at the end, uppercase or lowercase, but all the same,” clarifies the head of Hiberus.
Aside from the obvious benefits of having all the data in the same format, well sorted and organized, Minoli states, “Many companies believed they were making the right decisions, but as they matured, they realized that poor data quality caused them to make mistakes“. He gives the example of a motorway operator who found that he was unable to reliably calculate his profitability because each of his concessions in Spain had a different way of calculating how many vehicles passed through the respective sections.
“We had to unify everything,” he recalls. Therefore, after the ultimate goal of extracting value from information for the practitioner, the data management methodology lies in combining them so that they all tell the same story. “There are various sources of data in organizations and Each area uses them in a different way and draws its own conclusions, giving different truths.the government of data seeks this singular truth,” he explains.
The most surprising thing is that in the middle of 2023 and later over a decade of listening to the hackneyed mantra that data is the new oil, companies are still fighting with their More than 10 years have passed since the publication of the magazine Harvard Business Review (HBR) said that the job of a data scientist will be “the sexiest profession of the 21st century”. Since then, not only has the prediction been proven true, but everything related to data science, such as training, job tools and specializations, has flourished and given rise to a sector that has established itself in its own right.
How come companies still have problems with their data at this point in the movie? Leader Hiberus replies, “In 2012 big data It became a buzzword and all the organizations went to work but in a very disorganized way. A lot was invested in the issue of data, the problem was that the more data, the greater the disorganization. It was the beginning of a revolution, but no one knew that order would be so important“. Come on, it was a bit like starting a house from the roof.
BIG WASTE
The breakdown was such that in 2017, Thomas H. Davenport himself, co-author of an insightful article on data scientists, published another article in HBR warning: “70% of company employees have access to data to those who should not have access.” And this wasn’t even the worst.At the time, an expert estimated that companies’ decision-making processes did not include even half of the structured data an organization had, and for unstructured data, the utilization rate was “less than 1%”.
Gradually, companies began to become more and more aware of the chaos that reigned in their information bowels, and especially the waste it entails. In addition to the lost opportunities due to so much wasted data, according to Davenport, the lack of a holistic governance methodology appears to have caused analysts, Instead of analysis, they had to “spend 80% of their working time just to discover and prepare data”.“. Thus, “between 2019 and 2020, the industry started trying to organize everything and data management started to take center stage,” recalls Minoli.
Of course, it’s one thing to say it and another to do it. What steps need to be taken and what dimensions need to be considered in order to start using a data management methodology? Minoli answers: “It’s not something to do with technology alone, everyone in the organization has to be involved, know the strategy and know how to apply it. AND, To be successful, communication is very important because it has a large component of cultural change“. In fact, he points out that one of the keys to the process is “identifying roles and responsibilities,” adding, “Data governance is not limited to creating procedures and policies, but also defining who keeps it, who has access to it, and which. “These are, among other things, quality standards.”
In addition to the benefits for companies already using it, data management could become a productivity accelerator at the European level, especially now that the EU is starting to realize the importance of digital sovereignty. But it is one thing to keep data at home and quite another to have it stored in a way that can easily be used in Europe-wide initiatives such as hub the Gaia-X initiative.
The goal of this project is to “create an open and secure data infrastructure” so that companies on the continent can share their data and use it according to what Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence Carme Artigas told us, to be able to “solve problems they cannot solve by themselves.” Therefore, although the scope of application of the data governance methodology is usually found at the internal level of each company, in reality Gaia-X strives precisely for “mutual comparability of data outside the organization to be able to use all information in a regulated and secure manner according to the same norms and standards,” it states Minoli.
With this strategy, the EU aims not only to have information on a scale capable of competing with the big tech giants, but also to ensure that companies in its member states do not suffer the worst consequences if they do not have a data management strategy. One of them is this “By 2025, 80% of organizations looking to grow their digital business will fail.” for failing to adopt a modern approach to data management and analytics,” Gartner said in a report.
And even those who have done so are not guaranteed success because, as Minoli reminds us, “this is not a final project, but a program that coexists with the organization forever over time. It never ends because it evolves depending on tools, needs, politics…“. It would be nice if someone let Meta know, especially the last one. The company may know very well how to squeeze our data, but even if they are the ones paying the fines, we are the ones bearing the consequences.