Compliance has emerged as the largest driver of data management initiatives for 50% of CIOs and more than a third plan to increase investment in data governance in 2019, according to research by ASG Technologies.
This focus on data governance comes as a direct response to the introduction of new privacy regulations such as GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act. This is supported by over a quarter of CIOs (28%) who said they will invest more in data lineage.
Increasing access to data is also shown to be a priority with almost three-quarters (70%) of CIOs surveyed reporting that they have deployed a self-service data catalogue or business intelligence tool to enable business users to seamlessly access and leverage data.
There is a perception that improvements in data management tools will have additional benefits for businesses with half of CIOs (50%) feeling that better self-service data management tools could cut user requests for data in half, relieving IT teams.
“New privacy regulations are a major concern for businesses and is putting a lot of pressure on organisations to establish and maintain compliance. At the same time, they need to glean insights from all data to drive business performance and stay competitive,” commented Swamy Viswanathan, Chief Product Officer, ASG Technologies.
The survey also looked at the use of enterprise data within businesses, finding that it is most commonly used by IT teams (81%), compared to 64% of finance teams, 63% of marketing teams and 57% of business development teams.
Two-thirds of CIOs (66%) reported that only half of their organisation’s assets are available digitally, while another 30% reported that only three quarters of their data is available digitally.
“CIOs must balance the need for truth and trust with the opportunity to shape the business through data-driven insights by making data available to more users while meeting compliance requirements,” added Viswanathan.
"This survey shows that CIOs are focusing on these important initiatives by applying more automation to data intelligence while also expanding access through self-service tools to find, understand and use the right data for the right task.”