Data Governance

Data Governance is about managing valuable of data, in other words, the practice of using data to keep things accountable. A well-known turning point in history was the publication of Luca Pacioli's Summa de arithmetica. This encyclopedia of mathematics of its time, had a 26 page worth of text on what we call Double-entry bookkeeping, which became a foundational literature for accounting, the progenitor of using data to assign value to accounts, henceforth gave birth to the practice of data governance.

Accounting as the foundation of Data Governance

According to historian Jane-Gleeson White, Pacioli's double entry book keeping idea influenced the development of arts, sciences, and capitalism. Double-entry bookkeeping as a rigorous approach to ensure data integrity, not only influenced the practice of the accounting profession, and it had a significant impact on the the formulation of Hamiltonian Mechanics, which is a foundational theory of both classical mechanics and quantum mechanics.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton wrote a paper cited many many scholars to demonstrate that many ideas about complex algebraic manipulation that laid the foundation of scientific revolutions are based on the formulation of creating accountable mathematical formulation strategies through double entry book keeping. David Ellerman had a paper that explains the powers of double entry bookkeeping in sciences. The notion that creating public addresses for transactions amongst different accounts has been documented as a scientific theory about Double Entry Book-keeping. This book can be found online:

Digital Governance

Given the intellectual roots of data governance have strong linkages to mathematics and accounting, it is only after the introduction of personal computing devices, and later the ubiquity of Internet access that made data governance an idea relevant to public affairs. The argument is that many people's basic privacy and property rights maybe challenged by people who have access to data collection and deployment technologies. Imminent threats such as fake news, big brother monitoring practices, identity thefts, and crypto currency issuance are already challenging the stability of existing social fabric. These type of social debates are often related to the ideas of Digital governance. At this time, digital governance has not yet become a mature field of study, and it needs to be grounded in simple principles, so that it can be transparently practiced with local adaptations.

Conceptualization of Data Governance

Beside the notion of digital governance, data as an asset class must be kept accountable, so that it can be evaluated, and transferred with an objective operational framework. Knowing how to organize data in formats that satisfy consistent abstraction strategies, such as Universal Resource Identifier and Universal Resource Locator are important starting points in this field. Earlier work in data governance in a web of hyperlinked media can be traced back to Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson.

More recent more publications in this fields are Lessig's Code v2 and soon to be published work of Alex Pentland's Building the New Economy.

Institutionalized Data Governance

Influential institutions in the IT industry have been practicing Data Governance. According to IBM, their definition of data governance can be found here.