Strong data governance is essential to the resilience and adaptability of an organisation’s systems — and to enable it to develop the capacity to respond to change.
Presented by BDO
As organisations adopt artificial intelligence (AI), they need to ensure their systems are resilient and responsive to change. They must be properly managing their data to obtain the highest benefit from their technology, says Nick Kervin, National Leader, Digital, at advisory firm BDO in Australia.
Kervin defines the digital resilience of an organisation as having technology, data and people who are flexible enough to change and respond to events such as a shift in the geopolitical environment or a new business model.
“It’s making sure you have considered the ability to change in your technology choices,” he says.
A central part of resilience is having strong data governance, so as to allow that change to happen. Kervin says data governance can be an afterthought in some organisations, with little consideration given to who in the business owns and is responsible for it. It shouldn’t by default be the chief information or technology officer. Some organisations will be large enough to have a chief data officer, while in others, the responsibility will fall to the chief operating officer, an acknowledgement of data’s central role in every part of the business.
The most important thing is that chief executives acknowledge that someone needs to own it, and identify the best person to do that in their organisation.
Embracing AI
Data governance also plays a central role in an organisation’s successful adoption of AI. In a recent BDO survey of more than 1000 C-suite executives around the world, the respondents said one of the biggest restrictions to resilience and getting the maximum benefit out of AI is messy and siloed data.
In fact, says Kervin, many organisations will end up with the same sort of generative AI using large language models (LLMs) as their competitors. What will set them apart and give them a competitive advantage is the quality of the data they feed into those LLMs.
As organisations look to adopt AI, directors need to educate themselves on the different types of AI and how they could be applied in the business. It’s vital to have an AI strategy so these entities can achieve a return on investment.
“Organisations need to think about AI adoption as an enabler to enhance existing processes,” says Kervin. “If deployed in a tailored and secure way, it can add value right across the business.”
Most of the data LLMs work from is unstructured — emails, reports, product information. It’s generally estimated that unstructured and semi-structured data make up around 80 per cent of an organisation’s information, yet it is often the forgotten part of the data ecosystem. A big challenge is that while there are large amounts of unstructured data throughout an organisation, a single user will likely only have access to a small amount of it. Once again, this is where the organisation’s data governance owner will have an important role to play.
“When you start looking at your LLMs, they need to include your own unstructured data to give your GenAI context of your business,” says Kervin. “And if you have really poor hygiene around your unstructured data and you don’t know where it lives, and you don’t know how to actually harness the knowledge trapped in that valuable asset, then you’re not going to get the most out of your LLM.”
If organisations don’t value their unstructured data and just start pumping it into their LLM, they can’t be confident in the answers they get back from their AI. This also raises the issue of cybersecurity. Kervin says it’s as important for an organisation to protect its AI as it is to protect its Salesforce, Oracle and other systems.
“There’s an emerging world of testing AI from a cybersecurity perspective, to prevent bad actors from poisoning an organisation’s AI and rendering it inaccurate, skewed or biased,” he says.
“Like any technology, AI tools need robust governance and guardrails, so directors today should take the time to see how that looks for their organisation. With careful and considered planning, AI tools can have a hugely powerful enabling effect on business practices and performance.”
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