Over the past decade, the volume, velocity and variety of data have increased through business transactions, IoT devices and so much more. Data-driven decision making will soon become a central feature of economic and social life. Ongoing technological developments continue to shape how data is generated, collected, stored, shared, distributed, and analyzed by organizations.
And as organizations become even more reliant on data, the strategic governance of data and comprehensive understanding of when data is most vulnerable becomes more relevant.

There are five major moments where data is most vulnerable: collection, storage, sharing, analysis, and deletion. Many of these vulnerability points are part of a cycle, known as the data lifecycle. Understanding where the data lives within the system is how you can consistently take steps to ensure proper data governance.

When talking about data, we have to talk about what access we have to them: universities and academia, public administrations, companies and civil society: how do they share the data they create? Thanks to open data, those data sets usually prepared with public resources will be made publicly available. But in a datafied world where data production is widely distributed, while increasing their need for any purpose, the power of data requires a better and complex governance that contemplates multiple forms of sharing, access levels, licenses, as well as transparency, accountability and responsibility of all the actors involved in data management
and creation.

Over the past few years, cities have made huge investments in technological infrastructures such as 5G. As time passes, the possibility of integrating different infrastructures increases, but often times decision-makers lack a clear roadmap of public and private existing installations and cost expectations. However, with a deeper understanding of urban technologies, known as well as hidden financial and societal costs, we can build upon existing and create new infrastructures.

To shift the paradigm from citizenship adapting and abdicating to new technology, we can create, develop,
implement and monitor a smart city that is respectful of citizens’ rights and privacy and true data ownership and control.

Trade unions have been protecting workers’ rights for almost two centuries. Thanks to the collective bargaining power of worker unions as well as forceful measures, millions of people have the right to demand wage increases, access health services and to demand improvements in their working conditions. Nevertheless, current unions in developed countries operate today in a fractured world.

The rise of artificial intelligence, robots and their entrance into domestic and workspaces appear increasingly real. In parallel to the ascent of automation, so have worker voices of fascination and alarm. We’ve seen in real time the inevitable emergence of disruptive technologies and its detrimental impact on workers’ rights and how it has weakened the traditional mechanisms of collective bargaining, and employment rates.

It is paramount to introduce new ways of organising as we confront new challenges around the use and abuse of data, automated decision-making based on algorithms and artificial intelligence. Overall, there is an increased sense that the impacts of automation, digitalisation and platformisation could change the balance of labour relations, while also increasing the lack of transparency and accountability.