For most, Blockchain is associated with crypto currency, digital assets, tokenization, and decentralized finance – DeFi. A paradigm shift in the way we look at the transfer of assets – Value in Store.

But, once we look at the underlying technology of Blockchain, beyond the shining layer of digital assets, a wave of new opportunities emerges, which has potential to solve some of the decades-old problems haunting every back office– Data Governance.

In the last few years, organizations have spent millions on Data Strategy. This led to a great success in collecting data and applying it to uses that go far beyond just reporting. But Data Strategy did not address Data Governance from end to end effectively and did not excite or incentivize participant members and data sources enough to make it a true collaborative effort. However, Blockchain,also called Distributed Ledger Technology, is here to fill up this gap and noticeably compliment Data.

For our purposes here, we consider data governance as all those processes and systems that ensure high-quality data across organizational units, provide data security, increase consistency, and manage regulatory risks.

At the core of it, blockchain technology ensures that responsibility of keeping data consistent does not lie with just the owners of database. The life cycle of data, from its inception to current state, is validated by the participants at every step and any disruption in the consensus step will stop the data from going further up in its journey.

Another important aspect of Data Governance is data ownership. In traditional Data Strategy world “Who owns the data?” is still a million-dollar question. Once it is in lake and ready to be extracted or analyzed, who is accountable for the quality and integrity of the data and is it fair to expect Data Lake/Big Data team to own it and understand it for every participant business?

Blockchain provides an easy answer. There is no single owner of the data!

Multiple enterprise data models will converge, collaborate, and partner in production of immutable, co-owned, golden copy of final state of transaction – the Enterprise Shared Ledger.

Blockchain technology is tailor made for data governance. The potential to take the full audit trail of the data, along with its rules and embed it into the metadata, solves a wide range of data governance issues. Additionally, because blockchain networks constitute of cooperating peer organizations, they are suitable for the eco system where data governance is a common objective for mutual benefits, cross business data sharing as well as regulatory requirements of the data ownership.

As with all technologies, there are some compromises made and workarounds to be created before considering it, but blockchain databases may well become the core of Data Governance 2.0.

Vincilium will focus on converting the expensive, disjointed ecosystems of capital markets into seamless, collaborative, and secure Distributed Ledger Networks with main emphasis on interoperability and co-existence with legacy platforms