Data Governance as Success Factor for Data Science

More and more, asset management organizations are introducing data science initiatives to support predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. Asset management organizations are by nature data intensive to manage their assets like bridges, dykes, railways and roads. For this, they often implement data lakes using a variety of architectures and technologies to store big data and facilitate data science initiatives. However, the decision-outcomes of data science models are often highly reliant on the quality of the data. The data in the data lake therefore has to be of sufficient quality to develop trust by decision-makers. Not surprisingly, organizations are increasingly adopting data governance as a means to ensure that the quality of data entering the data lake is and remains of sufficient quality, and to ensure the organization remains legally compliant. The objective of the case study is to understand the role of data governance as success factor for data science. For this, a case study regarding the governance of data in a data lake in the asset management domain is analyzed to test three propositions contributing to the success of using data science. The results show that unambiguous ownership of the data, monitoring the quality of the data entering the data lake, and a controlled overview of standard and specific compliance requirements are important factors for maintaining data quality and compliance and building trust in data science products.