Data Strategy & Governance Services

Forward-thinking enterprise data strategy and management

Take charge of your data operations

Data is your organization’s greatest asset – and one of its greatest sources of risk.

Your data is only as valuable as your ability to extract insight from it and protect it simultaneously. Striking the right balance requires a data strategy that combines policy-driven data governance practices with a framework that drives efficiency while maintaining compliance.

BDO works with you to build a data-literate workforce, monitor data landscape health, and help optimize quality and data operations to use information as a competitive advantage. Leveraging global capabilities and innovative technologies, our multidisciplinary team helps you mine value from your data while mitigating risk and meeting legal and regulatory obligations. Looking across the intersection of law, business, and technology, we take a holistic approach to managing, monetizing, and protecting structured and unstructured data. 

How BDO Can Help

Capabilities

We help you assess your data strategy to develop practices aligned with your compliance obligations while improving business performance. We work with our clients to:

  • Align business and compliance needs with data strategies
  • Define long-term strategies that help optimize business, operations, compliance, and legal needs
  • Assess data management and governance practices
  • Coordinate people, processes, and technologies to implement successful programs
  • Develop governance frameworks that align with industry standards and organizational culture
  • Build data governance policies, standards, and procedures
  • Support ongoing data governance initiatives
  • Develop a data governance taxonomy
  • Implement master data management and governance strategies
  • Recommend, install, and configure data management tools
  • Develop, apply, and enforce data governance frameworks
  • Validate data and processes against data governance frameworks

We help you find the right balance between upholding individual data rights and capturing strategic value from your data. Our team helps global organizations to:

  • Understand consumer rights requirements and data rights strategies
  • Identify business opportunities to monetize data
  • Comply with individual rights obligations 
  • Automate the fulfilment of privacy rights requests
  • Develop compliant third-party data sharing practices 
  • Execute strategies and technologies to manage third-party data sharing
  • Implement data subject request fulfillment capabilities

We help legal, compliance, and technical teams develop defensible practices. Our team provides support before and during litigation, monitorships, and investigations. We work with clients to:

  • Inventory and map data sources relevant to the investigation or legal matter
  • Assess current infrastructure and data management strategies
  • Recommend, design and implement data lakes, warehouses, and lakehouses to manage global investigations
  • Migrate data from on-prem to cloud environments
  • Architect systems and migrate data to long-term monitorship environments

We help you to prepare, implement, and manage cost-effective data management and architecture strategies that deliver data analytic pipelines to users faster than traditional methods. We work with clients to:

  • Create data taxonomies, glossaries, and data lineage
  • Install and configure information governance catalogs
  • Discover, build, and deploy data pipeline solutions that deliver data to users to make operational, privacy, and protection decisions quickly

We help you take a systematic approach to records management by developing strategies and schedules to facilitate the implementation and operationalization of records retention and destruction practices. 

Assessments, Inventory, & Data Mapping

  • Conduct enterprise-wide or discrete data inventories 
  • Develop classification policies that are aligned with the scope of data created, collected, and used by the business 
  • Map relevant legal requirements to record classes and defining retention schedules
  • Align records management practices with data and information lifecycle management requirements
  • Design data flow diagrams that highlight risk, such as third-party data sharing

Implementation

  • Implement globally accessible online records retention platforms 
  • Investigate records exceptions based on geographies and regulations
  • Select software required to develop long-term data management plans
  • Develop data-related roles and responsibilities across the organization

Management & Governance

  • Incorporate data classification and disposition requirements into existing policies
  • Provide guidance during M&A and divestiture activities, including data separation playbooks and consolidating or relocating environments
  • Provide quarterly executive updates to highlight data management ROI over time
  • Train for new data managers and data custodians
  • Develop audit strategies and conducting annual data management and records audits

We help companies with identifying and classifying data to support separation activities associated with M&A and divestitures. 

Strategy, Inventory, & Classification

  • Determine the sensitivity of data for key systems
  • Organize and catalog data sets to document ownership

Recommendations & Playbooks

  • Provide guidance on data separation activities through customized playbooks 
  • Identify risks and impacts to underlying data based on separation decisions

Building the Data Fulfillment Process

  • Develop processes to efficiently and securely meet data requests based on Transition Services Agreements, including: 
    • Data Transfer Requests 
    • Data Access Requests
    • Data Deletion Requests
  • Select software required to develop long-term data management plans
  • Develop data-related roles and responsibilities across the organization

Management & Governance

  • Incorporate data classification and disposition requirements into existing policies
  • Provide quarterly executive updates to highlight data management ROI over time
  • Train for new data managers and data custodians
  • Develop audit strategies and conducting annual data management and records audits

Comprehensive Guide to Data Governance

In order to unlock the full power of your data across all business processes, you need holistic enterprise information governance.

Privacy & Data Protection Case Studies

Privacy & Data Protection Insights

Explore our most recent resources and thought leadership.

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  • Nonprofit & Education
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  • Retail & Consumer Products
  • Technology

Stay current with our latest privacy & data protection insights.

Meet Our Data Strategy & Governance Leaders

Do work that matters, where you matter.

At BDO, you can do much more than fulfill your career ambitions — here, you can explore your full potential. That’s because we’re committed to helping our employees achieve on both personal and professional levels.