What is a Data Trust Strategy?
Most business leaders believe that their organizations are making their data and data usage more trustworthy, though consumers tend to disagree. According to a PwC survey1, 55% of business leaders say that consumers trust them more with their data than they did two years prior, but only 21% of consumers made that assertion.
Businesses are underestimating this gap and are doing so at their peril. Companies that build trust are twice as likely to see ROI from use of data to generate new products and services, improve effectiveness of the workforce, and to make business operations run faster and smarter. Companies that build trust are also more likely to see data regulations as helping them to gain value from evaluating potential new partners or acquisitions, making business operations run faster and smoother, and generating new products and services. What is it that companies that build trust are doing differently to enjoy these rewards? They have developed data trust strategies and they are following them. To this end, PwC2 recommends developing a data team with expertise in finance, lines of business, data science, ethical data use, security, and privacy. They have identified four capabilities that these teams need to build and govern:
Govern. Set up a formal governance program to meet compliance standards, address risk, and to find strategies for the organization to better monetize more trusted data. Centralized data governance can reduce risks, improve compliance, and increase opportunities.
Discover. Many companies do not know what data they have, how it is to be used, or even what data is most valuable and/or sensitive. A full-scale assessment of an organization’s data is necessary to identify and categorize data that can range from trash to treasure, so that it can then be organized and properly utilized.
Protect. Data can be protected while also having its value enhanced. Put together an interdisciplinary team of business, risk, security, privacy, and compliance experts to examine and manage data. Together they can assess gaps, train employees on cybersecurity, and monitor third parties. Data-driven cyber risk management dashboards can allow business and leadership factions to quickly assess their security capabilities and increase trust.
Minimize. Govern, discover, and protect data that is needed, and removed all data that is not. Drafts, duplications, legacy data, and employee data are all superfluous and create risk.
Data is an inevitable partner in your organization. With proper management and interdisciplinary input from data stakeholders within the organization, data management can increase public trust and while also revealing opportunities for growth. Nobody puts data in a corner.
1 PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, 2020, PwC Consumer Intelligence Series, “Trusted Tech survey”
2 PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, 2021, “Global Digital Trust Insights Survey 2021”