Value and Data
Andrew Serwin
Board Member, Investor, and Partner and Co-Chair of the Global Data Protection, Privacy and Security Practice at DLA Piper
Picking up on the last post regarding value, risk and data, it is helpful to again return to the types of data that companies use to create value.?These include:
Having tried to define categories of data, it is also helpful to look at the individuals and entities that can benefit from data use, and these are just broad categories of key stakeholders—there are many more examples that can be provided.
The point here is two-fold.?First, in our Hybrid World, the use of data creates value, sometimes to the company using it, sometimes to an individual, sometimes to other companies or entities, and there have been any number of studies on this topic.?Examples include:
That list is hardly exclusive, and ultimately we do return to the four positives and negatives of a line of communication.?
While all of those are important, there is a broader point to be made about the use of data, which is that increasing the use of the right data will improve all decisions, because using data in inherent to making any decision, whether that is in the public or privacy sector.?Executives have many roles in a company, but as illustrated by a Harvard Business Review Article on executive decision-making, there is one key distinction between executives and non-executives in organizations:
The job of a manager is, above all, to make decisions. At any moment in any day, most executives are engaged in some aspect of decision making: exchanging information, reviewing data, coming up with ideas, evaluating alternatives, implementing directives, following up.
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To climb the corporate ladder and be effective in new roles, managers need to learn new skills and behaviors—to change the way they use information and the way they create and evaluate options.
?The Seasoned Executive’s Decision-Making Style, Kenneth R. Brousseau, Michael J. Driver, Gary Hourihan, Rikard Larsson, Harvard Business Review, February 2006.
There are also examples from the public sector that emphasize the importance of executive decision-making and the key role of information, including from the Naval War College in a text entitled “Executive Decision Making”:
Making high-level defense decisions is a large part of being a senior military officer or career defense civilian.
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These kinds of choices will push you into new, unfamiliar circumstances in which procedure and experience are no longer sufficient unto themselves. How do you decide whether to advocate producing a next-generation weapon or to push instead for a complete technological leap forward? This text will help you answer that kind of question by providing a structured approach to problem solving and decision making. It will help you identify and bound not only what is known and unknown, but also what ingredients are necessary to make a good decision.
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The key is to treat experience and lessons-learned as one source of data or evidence to bring to bear on a decision, along with all other useful information from other sources.
There are two key points to focus on from these examples—(1) the executive’s job, whether public or private sector, is to make decisions, and (2) efficiently getting the right, not just more, information is a critical part of executive decision-making.
Ultimately what this means is that if your company wants to make better decisions, and have resilient data strategies, it can’t simply focus on risk around data (let alone on privacy—a risk that is only related to one of the data sets), and instead has to focus on both the value side of the equation, as well as the risk side.?
In short, risk governance focuses on risk, but corporate governance focuses on both risk and value, and given the importance of data in the Hybrid World, any governance of data inherently has to account for both sides of the equation.