Organizing Data Governance: Findings from the Telecommunications Industry and Consequences for Large Service Providers

Many companies see Data Governance as a promising approach to ensuring data quality and maintaining its value as a company asset. While the practitioners’ community has been vigorously discussing the topic for quite some time, Data Governance as a field of scientific study is still in its infancy. This article reports on the findings of a case study on the organization of Data Governance in two large telecommunications companies, namely BT and Deutsche Telekom. The article proposes that large, service-providing companies in general have a number of options when designing Data Governance and that the individual organizational design is context-contingent. Despite their many similarities, BT and Deutsche Telekom differ with regard to their Data Governance organization. BT has followed a more project-driven, bottom-up philosophy; Deutsche Telekom, on the other hand, favors a rather constitutive, top-down approach. The article also proposes a research agenda for further studies in the field of Data Governance organization.