The volume of data in the digital universe has increased 9-fold in just 5 years, a significant component of which is generated by enterprises. IDC’s Digital Universe Study predicts that in the next five years “data will grow by a factor of 8, while the pool of IT staff available to manage them will grow only slightly”1. Meanwhile, the cost of storing such vast amounts of data by organisations is continuously reducing. This leads to a substantial increase in organisational data assets while appropriate data oversight and monitoring efforts are not always keeping pace with the growth of data. New digital channels for customers and employees (such as mobile applications and social media) contribute to the data accumulation and fragmentation for both static and transactional data. Data governance remains a focal point for regulators in the financial services industry in particular, who require that firms assess the controls over data underpinning the calculation and reporting of capital, liquidity and risk.
As such, we are seeing Audit functions being involved in thematic reviews of data governance, compliance with regulatory requirements as well as reviews of the data quality programmes themselves. Analytics capabilities (in-house or co-sourced) for the more mature of the functions allow the use of sophisticated data quality and profiling tools to assess data quality comprehensively and present results using visualisation techniques.