This week I, and Stibo Systems colleagues, attended NRF 2019: Retail’s Big Show in New York, where we listened to amazing sessions and spoke with various retailers – both domestic and international. These are my take-aways from one of the most significant retail events in the world.

Let me start by highlighting the one NRF topic that seemed to bind all the others together: data! Data and data management were hot topics and at the forefront of the business driven conversation. It seems there is now a better understanding of the need for high-quality data and good data management as the foundation for business success.

This is a recap of Stibo Systems’ webinar “How to meet and sustain the GDPR requirements using data governance” where The Data Governance Coach, Nicola Askham, shares insights into the relationship between data governance and data protection, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You can listen to the full 30-minute webinar on-demand anytime you want.

Just a few years ago, the discipline of data protection was mainly about securing who had access to your data and ensuring the data did not fall into the wrong hands. Data governance, on the other hand, was mainly about managing your data and improving your data quality. Despite what many people think, data governance and data protection have never been the same thing, and the line between the two disciplines used to be very clear. But now, Data Governance Coach Nicola Askham does not see this line existing anymore. Instead, we have a relationship between data governance and data protection where they work together and complement each other. What happened?

When it comes to governance, your first thought is probably government. But the term can also mean management or control through overarching rules – so laws, guidelines, and the creation of specific structures. The goal of structured data management is to ensure the availability, usability, integrity, security and confidentiality of information. No one disputes its value, and it has also been featured in previous blog posts and webinars.

So, data governance is nothing new – but many companies are only just getting around to it. But here's why they shouldn't wait any longer:

Just a year from now the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that aims to strengthen data protection for individuals, will come into force. It will affect all companies inside and outside of Europe that are storing and managing personal data of European citizens.

WARNING: Stranger Things Spoiler Alert!

Digital Transformation has been a trending strategic initiative for most companies for quite some time now.  Some have almost completed their journey, while others are just beginning. The results of a recent study show that only 19% have adopted or are leading digital transformation in their companies, 34% are in the planning stages and 47% are just starting to wrap their heads around the topic.

A new breed of financial services providers is currently disrupting the industry - delivering a whole new way of meeting the needs of today’s consumers.

Crowd-sourced investment funds, independent online investment and wealth management advisers, and mobile-only banks such as Atom and Monzo live on their customer's laptops and mobile devices, offering more flexibility, agility and convenience than their physical counterparts.

We live in a world where virtually everything is a source of data. Yes, I mean the type of world depicted in the opening credits of the movie, The Matrix – walls of mostly indecipherable information streaming in from all directions floating around in the air. This may seem like an extreme analogy to some, after all, it is just a movie, right? However, with the advent of housing data in “the cloud”, data actually is all around us. Data is constantly appearing, streaming, calculating and disappearing based on each one of our actions and interactions. So how do we differentiate between taking the blue pill, waking up with real data in our hands, and the red pill, traveling down the damaged data Matrix-like rabbit hole of duplicate and partial information?

Counterfeit medicine – fake and deliberately copied or mislabelled medicine that may be contaminated or contains the wrong active ingredient, no active ingredient, or the wrong dose of active ingredient– is a huge global problem. For you and me as individuals, it’s a matter of health and in worst case; life or death. For the pharmaceutical industry, counterfeits have the potential to destroy brands, as they  undermine both the industry’s revenues and reputations.

We’ve all seen these Design versus User Experience (UX) pictures on LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s a great illustration of the eternal battle between how a designer intends for their design to be used and how the end user uses it in a completely different way.

Image: bit.ly/1XuAG0V