There are already organizations that are addressing data governance for unstructured data, although currently a lot of the oversight may be relatively high-level (focusing on data access and control to a large extent). However, two aspects of unstructured data management suggest a large role for data governance in the future:
- The first deals with semantics -- the ability to scan documents and parse out concepts based on the words and the context in which those words appear.
- The other is enterprise search -- the capability to locate the details of a reference to terminology within the different document contexts.
There is no doubt that these two aspects will be united into a mechanism for establishing a master repository for unstructured data, which could potentially be integrated within a master data management (MDM) environment. In this case, the data governance that is so tightly coupled with MDM would be extended to incorporate unstructured data as well. I suspect that within the next 18 months we will begin to see solutions that start bridging the gaps that exist today in governing unstructured data.
More on data governance and unstructured data:
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