Governing Asset Management Data Infrastructures

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly looking to trusted data to drive their decision making process. Trusted data has a clear, defined and consistent quality which meets the expectations of the user. Data infrastructures which produce trusted data and provide organizations with the capability to make the right decisions at the right time are socio-technical networks, consisting of technical infrastructures and actor networks, and as such they are often complex and adaptive. Critical issues, challenges, and dilemmas can be identified while looking at data infrastructures as a socio-technical systems. This paper explores conditions and factors for effective and sustainable development of data infrastructures in organizations and suggests that the inherent complexity of data infrastructures requires a multi-faceted way of data governance. Several predefined components of data infrastructures which contain the behavior of agents through various coordination mechanisms have been developed to model the effect of data governance on data infrastructures. These components can be further customized to model an empirical situation more closely. Finally, the paper suggests institutionalization of data governance within an organization as a unifying concept towards the effectiveness and sustainability of data infrastructures, recognizing their inherent complexities. The approach is illustrated with a case study in the asset management domain.