Abstract

The paper will provide an example of the (unfinished) journey of creating a corporate data management function, with a specific focus on the ECB Data Office, established in late 2020.
Without doubt, today, data has dramatically changed its role and its recognition in our society. Within what some, like the founder of the World Economic Forum, call the fourth industrial revolution, data does not only serve to underpin both the transparency and the accountability of the decision-making processes but is itself a key resource for economic growth and competitiveness, as expressed in the European Commission’s data strategy published in 2020.
It is thus key for decision-making institutions on how to appropriately create and manage data throughout its value-chain, maximisation its value for decision-making processes, but as well for further economic actors, including the public. At the same time, a fine balance needs to be found respecting the applicable regulations, confidentiality and protection regimes in order to protect the legitimate rights of the reporting agents and others affected by the information.
As a cross-business area function, the ECB Data Office, established (as nucleus) in late 2020, is developing into a central part of the ECB’s corporate data management function. It aims at contributing to fulfilling the above-mentioned goal of an institution-wide data management and governance at the ECB, interlinking not only different business areas, but as well the banking supervisory part and the classical central bank part of the institution. The purpose of the ECB Data Office is to provide a single and sustainable user experience when working with data that are available across the institution. This involves making sure that data are managed in an integrated way and enable end-to-end digitalised, scalable and reproducible advanced analytics, but also that they are handled and collected efficiently, avoiding the duplication of data and ensuring a systematic closing of data gaps.
The paper will describe the journey and challenges of designing/redesigning the governance framework for a powerful corporate data management at the ECB, covering the required documentation as well as its structure and actors, achieving an appropriate mix of corporate, collaborative and local building blocks. In addition, the tools and success criteria for the data office are described and evaluated.
The paper will provide a first evaluation of lessons learned and required next organisational steps, which rests in particular on a better integration of data architecture, business architecture and IT architecture. In addition, the paper will highlight the limits in governance and will highlight with one example (the Integrated Reporting Framework for Statistical Data for bank reporting) the high relevance of input-integration in guaranteeing the usefulness of data, in particular for the creation of multipurpose datasets by, at the same time, reducing the reporting burden.