1.  Systemic Risk Councils will proliferate.  The Dodd-Frank Bill established a Systemic Risk Council in the Federal Government to aggregate financial data from across the economy to detect patterns of exposure that can impact macro-economic policy.  All Financial regulated entities should follow the leader and do this themselves.  Some, like JPMC and Goldman Sachs have been doing it for years.  Everyone who is not doing it should get on the wagon and replicate.

The Federal Government will take eons to gather all the data and make sense of it.  And even if they do it, there will be political considerations with regards to how the data is used and disclosed.  And forget about counter-cyclical policy-making.  So if you want your firm to escape financial ruin in the next Sub-prime, Sovereign Debt, Greek, Irish, Portuguese, or Spanish Debt Crisis, go and get a Risk Council and start sifting the data yourselves.  Processors and storage are cheap, data is widely available, what you need is the organizational structure, decision-making system, and a sound Data Governance program.  Get it going now, because with all the debt the world has accumulated there will be many more crises to predict.

2.  Health care will join the Information Revolution – Today, many doctors use the Internet to look up symptoms, anatomy, and, of course, pharmaceutical remedies.  Yet as an industry, there are so few information resources that document the comparative performance of doctors and hospitals in how they treat patients and the results.  In 2011, thanks to US health care reform, this will start to change and I foresee a nationwide movement to aggregate vast amounts of health care data to analyze and report on what works, what hurts, and start building plans to make care more efficient and more effective so that people live longer.  Data Governance will play a huge role in this effort, which will start next year and consume the next decade.

3.  National Incident Detection – Like it or not, the days of the Internet Wild West are numbered.  While the new Republican Leadership in the House is opposed to the Net Neutrality Bill, it seems certain that some form of national security oversight over Internet incidents and threats is going to happen.  The government has been trying to corral business into sharing incident information since 9/11 and I predict they will succeed at some point because nation-sponsored cyber-warfare can not be resisted by private enterprise alone.  In some as yet to be determined form, new information sharing regimes will need to be designed that aggregate threat information from businesses across the nation to develop early warning systems and protect national Internet assets.

4.  Self-Governing Commons – Human beings can, in fact, govern the use of common resources more efficiently than hierarchical or proprietary solutions.  The Information Governance Community is a demonstration of this fact, and in 2011, similar demonstrations will proliferate around the world and Social Networking itself will mature into online meeting places where people do more than talk – they will govern themselves to produce common work products.  An aggregation of people without a deliverable is a media channel.  Those same people collaborating on common ideas to produce work are self-ruling corporations and this phenomena will change how people are organized around the world.  Any idea or project can be accomplished by self-organizing groups of people with common interests, a governance model, and an incentive structure designed to produce an outcome to effect change.

Five years ago, we formed a Data Governance Council to change organizational behavior and effect change.  Achieving Semantic Consistency, Data Quality, Single Views of the Truth, Trusted Information, and Security & Privacy are all IT goals necessary to achieving any one of the above Predictions.  Information is changing the world and with information we can change ourselves.  However, without Governance, all we have is Data Management and none of what I described above is possible or probable.

Happy Holidays.