Data governance

It's often said that data is the “new oil” for service providers but, as with oil extraction, there are many dangers to collecting, processing, refining, and using data, particularly at scale.

How can data help?

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) can use data to increase personalization, improve customer retention and spot the potential for new services. Data can also be used for predictive analytics, such as fault detection, and help us respond to global pandemics, natural disasters and climate change.

New 5G ecosystems and services, from autonomous vehicles to sensor data, as well as smart cities and industries, all rely on data analysis. Codified information also powers autonomous operations and artificial intelligence (AI), which are critical as manual assurance cannot scale to meet digital demand.

Data dangers

Despite these benefits, many challenges and potential dangers remain in collecting and possessing vast quantities of data from calls, connected objects, and network traffic. The risk is magnified when data is combined with new technologies, such as AI, which could negatively affect people’s lives if misused.

Valuable data regulation laws such as GDPR must be agile enough to keep up with new technologies, and not impede solutions to critical societal problems such as global pandemics.

Agile data governance

Bias continues to be a quagmire for all those involved in handling data and a concern for governments and citizens. The issue of discrimination is a particular challenge to CSPs who often have access to the most extensive datasets on the planet and are at the centre of our “connected” lives.

It is, therefore, critical that service providers find ways to manage data to guarantee secure and correct handling, enabling data to be turned into insights and used for the public good. We can only achieve this by managing regulatory and legal constraints and adopting a sound data governance framework.

Discover how governance can work for you and how you can shape its future by clicking on the links in this section.