Malcom Gladwell popularized the phrase “the tipping point” in his best-selling book that highlighted how a series of events over time can lead to a moment when massive growth and expansion materializes.
Often, the triggers that drive these significant tipping point events are obscure and have enough latency that they may not be recognized or understood until after the fact. In other words, grasping the isolated multiple threads for a trend—whether societal, fashion or product related—that actually contribute to a tipping point event are a challenge.
Technological innovation is one area where we have no shortage of visionaries that conjure up the what, when and how technology will change the paradigm in which we live and work. We have a world of microprocessors powering billions of devices connected in the cloud.
Soon, we will live in a new era of self driving cars that process billions of commands from billions of sensors about the car, location, direction, speed and schedule. We are at the tipping point of the Internet of Things (IoT), where physical devices across the globe are consuming and creating data to drive a continuously connected world.
It was not a huge leap for the industry to realize that an IoT global network of continuously connected devices would mean that data would not only be created at geometric rates, but that it would become one of the most valuable commodities in the world. And although there are many new start-up companies storing, analyzing and integrating massive lakes of big data created from the IoT, not many have actually considered how the IoT will transform how organizations think and implement data quality and information governance.
Information governance is a set of core disciplinary structure, policies, procedures, processes and controls implemented to manage information at an enterprise level, supporting an organization’s immediate and future regulatory, legal, risk and environmental and operation requirements.
Gartner defines information governance as the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to ensure behavior in the valuation, storage, use, archiving and deletion of information.
While these are accurate and encompassing definitions, they are built on top of, and rooted in, processes that are being forever changed by IoT.
Data defines how you operate your company at a foundational level.
