Writing something like, “Data is transforming companies” in 2023 is like writing “The sun will come up tomorrow morning” – but still, it is true. Yet it is difficult to wrap our heads around the full import of that statement, that data is transforming business. In the best tradition of Henry Ford’s (apocryphal) quote, “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” all too often the assumption is that data has simply made business function faster, better, leaner, and more empirically-driven. But while (partially) true, that’s not the whole story. Data really is changing the business world. True, business fundamentals never change but the way they’re accomplished does, and has been.
Law.com Compass Pacesetter Research has just released a report on innovation in Data Governance, and almost none of the key findings have anything to do with technology. The impetus for this research came from the prominence of data privacy regulations and cybersecurity concerns in our conversations with the clientside (e.g., buyers of professional services like legal services) over the past year but as we dug into this research effort, we found the focus was on something more fundamental.
