Data Governance & Privacy
April 1, 2024
Defining a privacy compliance strategy has become central to an organization’s ability to gain and maintain customer trust and avoid steep penalties for any infractions – outcomes that lift the brand reputation while at the same time mitigating the risk of costly privacy violations.
Data Governance is a major foundation of a successful privacy compliance strategy, and is composed of four disciplines: Data Stewardship, Data Architecture and Technology, Data Security, and Privacy Compliance. While the first three are within a company’s control, Privacy Regulations around the world are always changing. Having a rock-solid compliance program to ensure your organization does not run afoul of any regulatory problems is a challenge all organizations around the world now face.
One facet of a successful, scalable privacy compliance strategy is to partner with data management tools that have compliance built into their systems, making your execution of privacy compliance scalable and more reliable.
Tealium has been building the right strategy to address these modern data privacy issues for almost a decade, and our investment has surfaced solutions that address three critical areas: building an Event-driven architecture, capturing data – including consent – in real-time, and flexibly adapting to changing requirements that new vendor technologies and integrations represent.
1. Utilizing Event-Driven Architecture
Tealium thinks of the world of customer data as “Events” that people produce as they engage with your business, both digitally and offline. An Event is defined as, “a significant thing that a customer does with respect to the engagement taking place.”
In essence, you’re viewing customer data in a deliberate way that’s meaningful to the business, and you’re planning for those Events by designing them for capture in the moments that matter. Now, that’s different from how the industry has previously thought of customer data. In the past, it was generally agreed that firehosing all customer data into a Data Lake was the right way to go, and then companies would simply deal with governance and context after the fact. This becomes a problem now because Privacy Regulations are compelling companies to be Data Stewards – we are not indemnified from managing customer data any longer; so as a result, it is absolutely critical that we decide on what data we want, and why, before it enters the organization.
That’s what an Event-Driven governance strategy can do for you. When Tealium released AudienceStream in 2013 and then EventStream in 2016, the technology was built to govern specific Device and Profile Events that were meaningful to the business, and so the stewardship responsibilities that we need to do are built into these tools. Back in those days, thinking of customer data in an Event structure was a nice-to-have. No longer. Now it’s a must-have, because Events represent data integrity and control and those elements have to traverse your entire data supply chain, not just an Analytics tool. So we carry forward the Event structure to make it compatible across the entire business, and you decide when and why you want these customer data Events to move to other places. As a result, the data lineage is absolutely clear.
And that’s so important because the Risk of allowing data to flow ungoverned and without context throughout the organization could result in massive financial penalties nowadays. Because Tealium has always placed the Event at the heart of the customer data initiative, we have always been able to comply with the changing Privacy laws and browser restrictions, and we’ve been presenting these solutions to the industry for a long time in anticipation of the industry adopting the same approach – that happened in October 2020 when Google officially announced GA4 as the mandatory approach to data collection. GA4 follows the Event-Driven approach. In essence, Google has validated Tealium’s strategy, and the rest of the industry is following suit. So the Event Driven architecture is the first thing element of how Tealium supports a winning privacy compliance strategy.
2. Capturing Data and Consent in Real-Time
The second thing that Tealium institutes is a real-time architecture into our solution set. Real-time sounds like a cool technique for Marketing, but it is even more critical when you consider the value of a Customer Data Hub with respect to Privacy and Compliance. Because Tealium captures Consent in real-time with our data collection suite, and then maintains it in real-time with our CDP, your organization can be assured that the customer data lineage and all subsequent profiling has full integrity and is 100% accurate. No other system in your organization can bear this responsibility because they aren’t built to manage customer data in real-time. Other systems, like CRMs and the MarTech stack, contribute to the CDH in a sound omnichannel approach to deliver the Trust that companies need to have in the Customer Data set in order to deliver against Data Subject Access Requests.
You cannot take the risk that the customer profiles you are looking at is outdated or duplicative. This is why a real-time CDP is mandatory in the Age of Privacy, because it becomes the ideal source for Consent Management Platforms to access for that trusted data set.
3. Ensuring your Connectivity through Flexible Integrations
Finally, the last element of Tealium’s strategy that fits nicely into the new era of Privacy being tied at the hip with Marketing, is the investment that we made into building integrations. And not only integrations with the destination vendors that need the customer data to conduct their campaigns, but also integrations with all of the relevant Sources of data where the customer data is surfacing. A CDP is no different than any other technology with respect to the need for good data: If that data is bad, then the technology will fail. This is why Connectivity is such a big differentiator for Tealium. We are investing in Business Relationships and Integrations with over 1300 of the most popular Ad Tech, MarTech, Analytics, and ML platforms in the market today, but we haven’t forgotten the importance of sound data governance on devices and systems.
Our Tealium iQ Tag Management System and EventStream API Hub give our clients the infrastructure they need to connect to any touchpoint and govern that connectivity according to security principles. Not only does this satisfy the legal team that must have full transparency into what goes “in”, but it meets the modern needs of a constantly changing environment for what goes “out” to all of the vendors that we want to do business with on a “need to know basis”. No more sending miles of data to BU silos and IT silos and allowing poor data governance to proliferate. With our commitment to expansive Connectivity, Tealium has turned this task into a Center of Excellence approach that can be managed effectively, at a cost and effort that is reasonable to the business.
What value do companies get when you get a privacy compliance strategy right?
A fully automated and controlled privacy compliance strategy incorporates a modern, Event-Driven architecture that overcomes restrictions in a compliant fashion, and produces a Center of Excellence that manages Data independently, as its own discipline.
We’ve all heard the adage “Data is the new oil” and that’s a great analogy. I would only add that Tealium is the “gasoline” to actually make the data move. Because Privacy and Marketing are now synonymous, a real-time approach to acquiring, managing, and integrating customer data is now a must-have.
Tealium connects data so you can connect with your customers. Learn more about how we can help you safely connect with your customers in a privacy-centric way by scheduling a demo today.
