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How do you steer on data quality at a strategic level?

By treating compliance as an opportunity rather than a box to tick. Vincent Lassauw makes the case that the same work which satisfies a regulator can improve processes, make an organisation more customer-focused and open up new initiatives, provided it is framed that way from the start rather than justified afterwards.

In many organisations compliance is still approached as an obligation: tick the rules, produce the audit report, move on. The argument here is that compliance can also be a catalyst for improving the business.

From obligation to opportunity

The same evidence a regulator asks for tells you where your processes are weak. Treating that evidence as management information rather than as paperwork changes what you do with it. The difference is not the work; it is who reads the result and what they are allowed to do about it.

What steering at a strategic level requires

• Data quality goals tied to goals the organisation already has, so they compete for attention on equal terms
• Ownership assigned by name, not by department
• A measure of where you stand now, so improvement is visible rather than asserted

Why this layer is usually thin

Strategic attention for data quality tends to arrive after an incident and fade before the fix lands. Tying it to an existing objective is what makes it survive the next quarter.

Based on an episode of the Databewuster podcast, recorded in Dutch. The episode, the summary and the full transcript are on the podcast page. This English article describes what was discussed; it does not quote the guest directly, because the conversation was in Dutch.