For several years TopQuadrant has been a sponsor at the DGIQ Conference in San Diego. This year the conference was bigger than ever! From our own experience, we know that this reflects the continuing fast growth in the use of data governance across many organizations.
While the conference attendance grew by about 25-30%, the number of industries represented also increased. It is no surprise that financial services were well represented, given the considerable regulatory compliance challenges they face. But we also spoke with delegates from companies in energy, manufacturing, healthcare and other industry sectors. So, it appears that adoption of data governance is happening broadly, with a range of organizations just starting their journey, while other companies have relatively mature programs in place – in fact even some mid-size banks today have over 100 data stewards!
One of the hottest topics at DGIQ was GDPR, the European General Data Protection Regulation that becomes effective in May of 2018. GDPR doesn’t affect only European-based companies but any company with customers in Europe. Indeed, interest in GDPR drew a large crowd at DGIQ to the presentation by Ralph Hodgson, TopQuadrant’s CTO, on, How Data Governance Capabilities for Profiling, Cataloging and Lineage also Support Regulatory Compliance
In the session, Ralph used GDPR as an example of how regulatory compliance often drives data governance initiatives and explained why enterprises are finding that graph-based knowledge representations are essential in meeting their regulatory compliance challenges.
By connecting all the related metadata, data, forms, and other compliance collaterals, these technologies enable organizations to navigate complex data governance landscapes such as those entailed in GDPR.
In the challenging financial regulatory world, The Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council has also taken a strong position that semantic engineering and graph technologies offer a solution for the mandated governance, infrastructure, and quality requirements. And as you can see in the list of Regulatory Actions in the figure above, GDPR is among these challenges (drawn from a slide presented in the EDM Council’s recent webinar “Regulatory Rx: Treating Root Cause”).
GDPR is such a crucial topic that TopQuadrant has also recently conducted two webinars on “Semantic Data Governance for GDPR Compliance”.
Webinar Recordings and other Assets from each are Available Here >>
Whether or not you are concerned about GDPR compliance, we know data governance can be an overwhelming undertaking and that every organization has different priorities. As such, we have created a staged approach to allow you to grow incrementally.
Visit TopBraid EDG Data Governance to learn more >>
The next events where we are sponsoring and exhibiting are Semantics 2017 in Amsterdam, September 11-14, 2017 and the Data Governance Financial Services in Jersey City, NJ, October 5-6, 2017. Please stop by and say hello!