data governance teams

Abstract: High-stakes tabular pipelines rely on scattered, static quality checks that are hard to evolve and audit against policy intent. Regulated domains particularly suffer as the LLM-era automation raises expectations for traceability and accountability. We propose a vision for an ontology-grounded, repository-native data quality layer in which rules are first-class artifacts: versioned, provenance-linked to governance texts, and re-playable through immutable execution traces. As a first step toward validating this vision, we present a concrete implementation of its agentic rule-discovery core with two rule acquisition modes (Full-Agentic and Guided) and a human-in-the-loop (HITL) review interface. We define an evaluation framework and run experiments addressing whether our fully autonomous, divide-and-conquer agentic rule discovery produces rules of the same quality and diversity as those specified by a human expert, reporting preliminary results on two real world industry datasets in the finance and retail domains.

Abstract: Enterprise AI agents that share a memory store face two unaddressed risks: sensitive data can leak through legitimately computed results the requester could not derive, and departments can silently compute a same-named key performance indicator (KPI) through conflicting logic. Existing agent-memory systems (e.g., MemGPT, Zep, A-MEM) gate retrieval by content, ownership, and role, not derivation, missing a cached insight that embeds a forbidden column. We introduce the Analytical Memory Unit (AMU), a memory schema that attaches a full derivation (lineage) graph to every cached result, gated by a retrieval policy that serves a hit only when the requester is authorised for every column touched. Provided lineage recording is complete, we prove by construction that the policy blocks retrieval of results derived from a sensitive column outside the requester's permissions, at O(n) worst case -- a conditional design guarantee, not an empirical claim, that excludes derived features encoding sensitive information without naming their source. Eliminating measured leakage required 75-90% recorded lineage completeness, so we treat 90% as a conservative deployment target. Across six experiments, lineage-gated retrieval removes the 18.8-25.5% cross-department leakage naive content-gated memory suffers, keeping 81.5-82.6% of memory reuse at 13.8 microsecond worst-case overhead. A real-agent proof-of-concept with LLM-generated SQL is consistent with the guarantee: zero leaks over 9 round-trips, two conflicts caught automatically -- though a feasibility demonstration, not evidence of production viability. This offers a practical governance layer for shared agent memory, complementing source-layer access control and supporting EU AI Act compliance.

Abstract: In this work, we consider algorithmic harms that may arise as generative models are incorporated into machine learning platforms. We argue that existing harm taxonomies and threat models require extension to (1) address novel causal drivers of well-studied representational and quality-of-service harms; and (2) anticipate and mitigate endogenous harms, such as sanitization, which may arise when system inputs are misaligned with the system designer's objectives, or the generative model's inductive priors. To this end, we introduce an expanded taxonomy of algorithmic harms associated with the use of generative models in non-conversational recommendation systems. In addition, we offer a causal analysis of how problematic subsets of the (input, output) joint distribution can arise, in an effort to inform harms detection and mitigation efforts.

Abstract: Dataspace connectors decide whether a transfer may occur, not what the transferred value contains, tolerable for contracted applications, not for LLM agents that compose tool calls and spawn sub-agents. Research on agents that generate governance artifacts evaluates output quality; who may authorize an artifact for use falls between that literature and the governance literature, and neither owns it. A published policy is what a dataspace's decision point enforces, so publication is a governance event, and an agent that is both policy subject and policy author writes the norms that bind it. We name this the authorship hazard and state one principle: an agent is a subject of the governance plane, never an author of it. Its authorization channel to publication is closed by construction; its influence channel, drafting what humans approve, is treated as an enforcement problem. On a frozen corpus of agent drafts, publishing without approval reverses 80 authorization decisions, most through drafts that change only a field's sensitivity classification and no policy text; a classifier that reads the policy diff misses every such draft, necessarily. Treating classification as authorship routes them all to review; the registry-held classification this requires is designed and modelled here, not yet implemented in the prototype. At the execution boundary, protected fields reach the model in 105 of 105 cases under prompt-stated duties and in 0 of 105 when the ODRL duty is compiled into an invocation-time tool-call constraint, but where the value is not confined to a named field the compiled condition exposes it in 7 of 7. A centrally provisioned approval pool does not scale to the participant volume that motivates the problem.

Abstract: In the era of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), data has become the essential foundation for digital transformation, yet many organizations still struggle to link data practices with digital performance outcomes. This study investigates how data collection strategy and data quality jointly influence the success of digital technology adoption (DTA) in manufacturing firms. Drawing on survey data from 86 firms, the research employs Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the relationships among data collection strategy, data quality, implementation performance, and operational performance. The results show that both data collection strategy and data quality significantly influence implementation and operational performance. However, the effect of data collection strategy on implementation performance is indirect, fully mediated by data quality. The study also finds that data collection strategy influences data quality. These findings demonstrate that data quality acts as a critical bridge between upstream data practices and downstream digital outcomes. The study contributes to the digital transformation and data management literature by empirically validating the central role of data quality and offering practical insights for managers to design and govern data processes strategically. It also sets a foundation for future research on data governance frameworks that integrate data quality assurance, standardization, and lifecycle management to sustain data-driven and digital transformation.