RESEARCH REPORT ON

BIG DATA GOVERNANCE

ITECH 7407 – REAL TIME ANALYTICS

GROUP REPORT BY:

KANIZ E ZAINAB (30388884)
RAGINI SHARMA (30385902)
ANURADHA (30388840)
SAHIL NAIN (30384116)
TABLE OF CONTENT
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………1
Review of Case Study……………………………………………………………………….3
Limitations and Ethics…...…………………………………………………………………5
Challenges…………………………………………………………………………………...6
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...8
References…………………………………………………………………………………...8

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INTRODUCTION
This report discusses the topic big data governance. Big data comprises of structured and
unstructured data and requires essential skills and infrastructure to extract meaningful value
out of the organizational data that is huge in volume, velocity, variety, and complexity. (Van
Den Broek, T., & van Veenstra, A. F, 2018). Big data has paved a way to big data analytics
which helps organizations to streamline production process, optimize office activities, keep
an eye at the market trend and all this is to meet the customer satisfaction. (Moyle, E. (2015).
To maintain this data is vital for any organization and hence to practice this big data
governance came into existence. This helps to maintain data availability that remain
consistent in the database and across all the files through necessary policies, procedures, or
strategies. When the big data governance is in place it helps to maintain data integrity, and
security and when the data integrity is maintained then it can be used for making business
decisions eventually increasing the company’s value. The big data technologies are ought to
be disruptive and has a lot of ethical issues or concerns, and when the technology is
disruptive it can lead to decrease in organization’s profitability while also putting them under
legal procedures. One such policy laid down is General data protection regulation (GDPR) by
Europe commission that organizations can follow to avoid legal privacy issues. The authors
Van Den Broek & van Veenstra, suggests that they should be a decentralized governance
structure to foster innovation among the organizations. When organizations collaborate with
each other for innovative purpose they should adhere to compliance policies and their
effectiveness can be known only when there is good governance and, in this case, it is big
data governance. Big data governance supports the inter-organizational innovation in two
ways firstly, it will ensure that the resources are being exploited only for innovation purpose
and secondly it can ensure that risks are minimized that may have or will arise from this
collaboration (Van Den Broek, T., & van Veenstra, A. F, 2018).

The risks that may arise in organizations or in inter-organization collaboration can be

minimised and the value can be maximised with the help of big data governance. Moyle in
his article states that the businesses or organization should take an action which seems to be
risky in the short term, but it is anyways less risky that not taking the action at all. The
holistic risk management consists of business and technical risks where the decision is made
based upon the following, business value is optimized even when new risks are introduced.
These new risks are judged in accordance with the long term benefit they will reap. With the
help of big data governance, the required data will be sent to the stakeholder only on the

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required time and the business will know what risks are expected and mitigation policies can
be implemented. Hence the big data governance will be helpful in taking the right decision
for the organization (Moyle, E. (2015).

The researcher Zhu in her study established two hypothesis one is the alternative data
availability increased price informativeness and it reduces the magnitude between trades and
future unexpected earnings which became the condition for trading and through her study
proved so. She has used online consumer transaction data and satellite image data, while one
seems to be structured the other is unstructured and will eventually become big data. The
author used the prices as the governance mechanism which eventually discipled manager to
invest efficiently. This would overall lower loss and increase profit for the organization (Zhu,
2019).

Majdi et al in the study in 2019 have examined relationship between the big data governance
and dynamic capability and decision making and based upon the fuzzy sets approach
modelled two approaches, where to gain effective decision making, on one hand the big data
governance, organization’s age and number of staff was considered whereas on other hand
dynamic capability, organization’s age and number of staff was considered. It was found that
the firm age was considered against dynamic capability and data governance and it lowered
the effective business decision making with respect to dynamic capability and increased
business decision making effectiveness with respect to big data governance. This study
revealed that any organization to profit, decisions are important and data-driven decisions
have proved to be useful as well as when the managers utilized the big data governance, they
were able to make evidence-based decisions and hence the big data governance should be
considered as a strategic asset as it may cause positive impact on the organization and their
overall profitability (Majdi et al, 2019). Crampton argued that there are two critical issues
such as reconceptualization of privacy and algorithmic security where big data is creating a
wide impact (Crampton, 2015).

As per my understanding data governance can be considered as a treasure as it can increase

organization’s profitability, be it from any industry. The compliance policies and procedures
are the bare minimum that every organization should adapt if they want a long-run success
while they should also measure the risks equally. The data governance should not only be
about managing data rather it should also assess risks and mitigate them as this will further
lower the loss to the organization and provides an overall benefit to the organization.

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REVIEW OF CASE STUDY

In this research report we have considered a ridesharing in emerging markets case study and
have analysed it in the light of big data governance. We have chosen this case study because
of the field of technology as sharing economy is relatively new and under-explored.
However, the benefit from this market is expected to be immense. J. Basukie et al (2020), in
their case study researched a ride-sharing platform local to Indonesia named Go-Jek and
explored more about the application’s sections such as allocation of work, rating system and
legal and ethical concerns. They conducted semi-structured interview on stakeholders who
used this application, the users or customer, the driver, data scientists and regulatory bodies.
The ride sharing platforms are increasingly used in today’s modern and technologically
equipped world. From the first ride-sharing service named Sidecar in 2011 till today, it has
been over a decade that this kind of service has started and hence more knowledge about this
topic is essential due to increasing usage by drivers and customers.

The ride-sharing platforms comes under the sharing economy. Sharing economy is all about
having shared resources rather than having the ownership for example Airbnb. This economy
is believed to increase 24 folds by 2025. Ridesharing is one such part of sharing economy and
after US, India is the largest market for Uber. But this tremendous growth relies on certain
factors and those being big data governance and algorithmic. The algorithm decides a lot of
workflows in the application such as judging the driver’s performance, work assignments,
and it also knows if the driver is associated with other ridesharing applications and whether it
uses them in alignment. This can give rise to discriminative and unfair outcomes. One such
example is Uber’s Greyball software which was part of Uber application breached policies in
London as it did not allow the government official to gain access to the application which in
turn did not allow them to freely exercise their law enforcement duties and this was due to the
powerful tool – Algorithm. Hence, to overcome this algorithmic management becomes
essential.

I feel using Indonesia for the case study would be unbiased because it is one of the growing
digital economic country and due to poor infrastructure and public transport citizens tend to
use personal vehicles or ridesharing applications. The Go-Jek is popularly used, and its Go-

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ride and Go-food are the widely used service. The application function is following way: The
customer requests a ride, the application uses customer’s GPS and matches them with the
driver, once the service is availed the driver is paid money in cash or through Go-pay. If the
driver’s rating is below 4.3 it will affect their payout. The research question in this case study
was “What are the challenges of big data governance and algorithmic management for the
sharing economy platforms operating in emerging markets?”. Using this question, the
researchers interviewed users and drivers and were able to capture negative impression
towards data governance and algorithm. The findings based on work assignments are, the
drivers were paid unfairly depending upon their choice of vehicle example two-wheeler or
four-wheeler, the maps needed to be re-engineered for two-wheelers, unfair algorithm. The
findings for performance and rating were, algorithmic mismatch between reviews and ratings,
customer understood rating, fake customer reviews, and poor data management. The findings
for legal and ethical concerns were fake dashboard data, no restrictions in forming algorithm,
regulation differences between different governmental departments and no regulation for
local transport. This case study found that drivers were being discriminated by making them
stay on the less profitable time and roads. The big data governance is next to absent for
drivers the algorithmic data-driven decisions substitutes to unfairness (J. Basukie et al, 2020).

In contrast to ridesharing the banking has better big data governance. The automated
calculations which channel the firm’s resources, but they are in turn governed by the firm’s
managing and risk models which are based upon regulatory standards. The big data and
algorithms are transforming the old institutions and mediums of transactional governance.
There should be an acting medium between humans and technology for better governance in
global finance (Campbell-Verduyn, et al, 2017).

Atrium health adapted big data governance and built a data governance plan. The major aim
of this conversion was to extract maximum benefit from it. For example, when the analytical
data of the patient is obtained it can clearly depict the trends during treatment which will in
turn help the doctors to take timely and strategic decision about further treatments to the
patient. It enabled and powered the clinicians to make strategic decisions. The organization
set up strategies that would ensure data privacy and the information was managed in more
holistic way (Fuller, 2018).

However, the governance challenged faced by all the above industries are having a correct
balance between risk and prize while the volume of data keeps on incrementing. For this the

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industries should rather adapt those governing practices that best suits them. Regulation.
Forecasted data growth, IT standardization centralized IT and organization structure are few
enablers of big data governance. Adhering to data governance practices will lower cost for
the organizations (Tallon, 2013).

LIMITATIONS AND ETHICS

In this section of report, we will discuss the importance and limitations of big data
governance and what are the challenges faced in different industries. These challenges are not
limited to governance but also the algorithms. These algorithms are an essential part of
computational technology resulting technocratic governance. These are now part of very
person’s life and invading their day-to-day activities. Not only activities, but these algorithms
are also notorious to invade customer’s data and big data privacy is another concept to deal
with this. I feel when the users have more control of the data using the governing practices
the users will feel in charge of their privacy and protection. This also gives the organizations
to build better customer relation (Janssen & Kuk, 2016).

Priebe & Markus (2015), in their research have discussed about business information
modelling and suggests that BIM was effective for data warehousing similarly it will be
useful in big data governance as well. The BIM uses elements like area, entity, and attributes.
When the big data is sorted in such a manner it is obvious that the data availability is easier
and can be used in cross-system categorization. They believe that the tagging approach which
they have implemented in Accurity glossary tool, which mainly helps to structure business
requirements, can create end to end information catalogue and they argue that this is the
optimized way. From this research paper I understand that there is no single way in which the
data should be considered for storing. As the data changes they should also be variation in the
way it is stored, managed, and handled.

In Denmark’s health care setting the extraction of citizen’s data and analysing this data does
not comes with any strict rules or implication and the governing system is poorly maintained.
The only consent model that will allow the citizens to make choices where they will be able
to make a preference of when and how they can provide consent of what can be done with
their data is governance model. This supports ethically and can be practically implemented
(Holm & Ploug, 2017). I feel this model should be considered mainly for two reasons that is
it allows the citizens to stay in control of their data and then it also limits big data as a
disruptive technology.

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Finally, the concept of big data governance should not be alienated to ethics. Not just the
business organizations the government organizations are equally responsible of collecting
individual data and utilizing it for analysis (Jordan, 2014). The catch here is that these
government organizations are not in public eye like the other organizations and mostly no one
questions them. There should be necessary regulations imposed irrespective of the
designation. A beneficence structure with refinement on the bottom with precautions and
beneficence on above levels has the essential ethical principles. The beneficence will
maximize profit and minimize risk. It is like a virtue which should be used so that every in-
position organization or body that utilizes the big data for analysis purpose should consider
the benefit of the individual rather than themselves. This ethical principle will create a trust
relationship between the organization and individual. In the lower layers such as the
precaution and refinement it is recommended that those in power to utilize the data should
make sure that they critically think of the insights and work towards individual’s welfare
rather than being self-centred. Though the author has rightly expressed the ethical principles I
feel unless there is a transparency between who utilizes the data and users this ethical
principle will just be like a notion no one adheres to. The ethical principles should revolve
around the concept of privacy, security, and mutual benefit (Arthur, & Owen, 2019). The big
data governors should practice values and ethics when dealing with big data. I would suggest
for overcoming the ethical dilemmas that the organizations would face there should be a
control that can be given to the user and they should be able to see each time the user’s data is
used and what data is used should also be specified.

CHALLENGES

Putting big data governance or information governance into perspective is a challenging task
and the extent of challenge depends on organization to organization. Some of the common
challenges of Big data governance are discussed as under:

Lack of data leadership

Acquiring big data from complex sources and then analysing it using different tools is a
skilful task and the organisations are always short of skills related to big data governance. In
addition to leveraging the data for fulfilling the benefits of organisations, they also need to
implement the possible protection strategies to deal with the privacy and security related
challenges of big data governance (Trom & Cronje, 2019).

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Understanding business value of data governance
Every organisation has certain objectives and big data governance should be aligned with
those objectives to create business value to achieve those objectives. Organisations must
understand how their ROI’s will impact if the data is not governed efficiently and effectively.
Organisations must invest in dealing with the technical challenges related to big data to create
more business value (Morabito & analytics, 2015).

Recognising the need/pain caused by big data governance.

Before extracting and combining big data from multiple sources the organisations must
clearly define the need of big data and what problem they are going to solve it. Clearly
defining the goals can be helpful in accumulating only the relevant data and help in
minimizing the wastage caused by excess technical resources. Some of the potential risks of
big data governance should also be discussed in advance (Janssen & Kuk, 2016).

Sponsorship and support

To reap the full potentials of big data, it is necessary to have full support from senior level
managers and other sponsors who must purely believe in the potentials of big data
governance. Support from senior level managers is always critical in achieving the best
practices related to big data governance in the organisations.

Budgets and ownership

All the budget relevant to ownership and analysis of big data must be well planned. Lack of
budget allocation is one of the biggest challenges that organisations face while dealing with
big data. Organisations need to spend the right amount of time and money resources in
handling the data as well as protecting it.

Lack of data documentation

Data documentation is one of the key challenges faced with big data governance. Metadata is
generally termed as the data about the data. Organisations must have clear records of how
much data they have and the sources from they acquired the data. Someone in the
organisation must be responsible for recording all the relevant information about metadata.
Metadata storage, metadata access, metadata orders, and metadata maintenance must be
clearly recorded (Al-Badi, Tarhini, & Khan, 2018).

Resources to big data governance

Classification of resources to store and handle the big data is also a key challenge in dealing
with the big data governance. What amount of the data must be stored in the organisations

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database and what amount of data must be stored in the cloud, selection of cloud services
providers and the type of services that must be used to optimize the big data governance are
some of the key questions that needs to be answered carefully.

Data overload and rise of the unstructured data.

With the increase in volume and the variety of big data, the challenge of managing it
effectively and efficiently also increases. Unstructured data that is typically in the form of
videos, texts and pictures is difficult to analyse and protect as compared to the data stored in
relational databases. Organisations must have predefined strategies of dealing and analysing
with the data collected from various social media platforms, Internet of Things. All the
technical resources, human resources and financial resources required to deal with the
unstructured big data must be planned well before.

In conclusion, we can say that big data governance is not an easy task. The challenges related
to governance of big data depends on multiple factors such as type of organisation and its
objectives, types of data and the quantity of data. Well documentation of all the
organisational data is very important factor that must be taken into consideration.

CONCLUSION

This research report is an in-depth analysis of big data governance and its usage in various
field. The big data governance is not just related as management of data but rather there are a
lot of terms associated with it and essential parameters to be considered. The case study gave
us an insight of the big data governance and algorithmic management is abused by the
organization when the stakeholders are drivers this clearly shows that the algorithms can
clearly mishandle the whole process and we suggest that there should be an intermediatory
between human and technology in such scenario. The big data governance should be
followed with respect to ethics based on mutual benefit and on data security and privacy. In
the last section the challenges faced by the big data governance were discussed.

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