People often confuse “data management” and “data governance”. This summary will explain the difference between the two concepts, which are related but also critically different.
Data management pertains to the process of managing data with regards to how it’s ingested and organized. For example, in the world of tagging, how does an organization collect data from a customer when they visit your website? Which products are they clicking on? What are they buying? What is the average time they spend looking at information before they add it to the cart or check out? What systems ingest that customer data? And then once that data exists within the organization, where does it live? What other systems does that data flow to? Is the data eventually archived in a data warehouse or discarded? What pipelines do the data flow into? Put another way, data management is largely a question of what the architecture of data looks like within your organization.
Data governance pertains more to who owns the data and refers to the processes around whether that data is privacy-compliant and lawfully collected. Where data management is primarily concerned with all of the systems that process data, governance is more concerned with the legality and security of the data being collected and processed. Questions in this realm: is it legal for your organization to collect customer data from these customers on these specific websites in a particular region of the world? If the customer submits a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) because they wish to receive a copy of all their personal data, can the organization comply? Does the organization specifically have a way to understand all of the tagging platforms that are firing on their site? If a tag piggybacks on another tag, does the organization have a way to ascertain this new piggybacking tag? Does the organization have a way to identify illegitimate tags firing on a site and remove them? And finally: does an organization have a quick and easy way to inventory all of the tags firing on their platform so they know who to contact if specific issues arise with that particular tag?
Tag Inspector from InfoTrust is a tool that helps your organization with data governance when it comes to understanding and practicing good governance on the tagging technologies deployed on your websites. Tag Inspector gives you an easy way to see all of the tags that may be firing on your website and also a way to specify tag governance policies that will inform you whether a new tag has appeared on a particular site within your portfolio of sites. Additionally, Tag Inspector can furnish additional information such as how the tag is loading, the exact JavaScript it may be tied to, and the tag’s page coverage on your site. The governance and legal personnel of an organization can then examine the information that Tag Inspector surfaces to make an informed decision on whether the tag is allowed to be deployed and how it should be configured on the customer’s site.
If you are interested in data governance, please contact InfoTrust today! We’d be happy to discuss further and help your organization practice good data governance.
