Data governance and digital innovation: A translational account of practitioner issues for IS research

Abstract

There is widespread agreement in research and practice that data governance is an instrumental element to help organizations leverage and protect data. IS research has observed that our practical and our scientific knowledge of data governance remains limited, and the increasing ability for organizations to generate, acquire, store, transform, process and analyze data calls for us to further identify and address issues on the topic. Striving to contribute to answer this pressing need, we argue that understanding the nature and the implications of governance mechanisms is of high importance as it is these mechanisms that effectively instantiate data governance in an organization. Building on our experience preparing and teaching workshops to 102 executives on the topic, we adopt a position of engaged scholarship and provide a translational account of our pedagogical experience on data governance, highlighting four outstanding themes for IS research. We argue that these four themes—(1) embracing data governance without compromising digital innovation; (2) enacting data governance through repertoires of mechanisms; (3) moving away from data governance toward governing data; and (4) moving away from a view of data at rest to adopt a service-based perspective on data governance—are highly relevant for practice and research. In our view, studying these themes will contribute to inform practitioners who often struggle with the implementation of comprehensive data governance programs and frameworks. At the same time, the ability to leverage theory to study these themes can help research generate novel theoretical contributions on data governance, helping future research on the topic.