As the volume and complexity of data continues to grow, organisations must put in place governance processes to protect their data and ensure its efficient and responsible use.
By Dr. Jonathan Reichental, Professor and Author

"Quality data at scale can contain remarkable answers and insights."
Every business today is a technology business, each generating vast amounts of data. This has created remarkable opportunities and challenges.
The datasphere, the term for all the data we’ve created so far, is around 100 zettabytes and it’s going to double in about three years. A zettabyte, a term unfamiliar to many, is a large number. It’s one followed by 21 zeros. To put this in perspective, you’d need one billion terabyte hard drives to store one zettabyte of data. This scale of data and the velocity in which it is being created is consequential for every organisation.
Data is the most valuable asset
A consensus has formed in the business and data communities that data has now reached a point in which it is the most important asset in every organisation. My own research validates this.
Quality data at scale can contain remarkable answers and insights. With the right skills and tools, organisations can leverage data to enable improved decision-making and optimised operations. They can use data to drive competitive advantage, unleash innovation, and solve a wide range of intractable problems for business and society.
But achieving these results with data doesn’t happen without deliberate effort. The power of data is only realised through skillful governance.
The importance of governance
Whether we call it data governance or not, every organisation has some form of oversight for the data it handles. It could be as simple as knowing that data is being backed-up, or where certain data is located and who has access to it. Data governance, informal and formal, spans a wide continuum of approaches. However, it all comes down to this: is data being fully managed in the organisation and is its value being realised?
So, what does this actually mean in practice?
"The governance and management of data has become an actual science."
Defining data governance
At a high level, we can define data governance as data that is managed well. In aspiring to achieve high performance in managing data, we must ask to what degree are there agreed policies and processes for handling, for example, sensitive, legal, and regulatory data requirements? Are there documented accountabilities, formal decision structures, and enforcement rules for data? The right talent, processes, and technologies must exist. These are some of the many core attributes of good governance.
Today, the governance and management of data has become an actual science. There’s a wide range of data science professions and supporting educational programs. Software for supporting these professions has exploded in recent years, including incredible solutions for analytics, visualisation, and more. Increasingly, they are being powered by artificial intelligence.
Governance is a choice
In the absence of quality data governance, an organisation will never fully realise the potential of data and in fact, may subject itself to increasing levels of risk over time. These risks include inadvertently using bad data, experiencing privacy challenges, and suffering from the consequences of weak cybersecurity.
The demand for high-quality data governance and its promise is quickly making it a core function of an increasing number of organisations. Data can create important value for every organisation and to achieve this in an optimum fashion requires high-performing data governance. If it’s implemented well, it can be transformational.
Dr. Jonathan Reichental is a multiple-award-winning technology and business leader whose career has spanned both the private and public sectors. He’s been a senior software engineering manager, a director of technology innovation, and has served as chief information officer at both O’Reilly Media and the City of Palo Alto, California. Reichental is currently the founder of advisory, investment, and education firm, Human Future, and also creates online education for LinkedIn Learning. He has written three books on the future of cities: Smart Cities for Dummies, Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids, and Exploring Cities Bedtime Rhymes. His latest books include Data Governance for Dummies and a Cryptocurrency QuickStart Guide.
Public-private ventures in higher ed: International Pathway Colleges
Public-private ventures in higher ed: International Pathway Colleges
Collaboration between the public and private sectors in the higher education industry is growing. How does this benefit international students?
By Dr Cheryl Yu, Interim Director of International Partnership, London College of Fashion, University of Arts London and Shazim Husayn, Director of Internationalisation, University of Galway
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
UK universities engaging with private providers for student recruitment as well as pathway delivery is not new. However, recently there is growing engagement between the public and private sectors, such as exclusive recruitment contracts or public-private integrated International Pathway Colleges (IPC). This is seen in collaboration between OEIG with the University of the Greenwich, INTO University Partnership with the University of Lancaster, and CEG Oncampus with the University of Loughborough, to name a few.
Why public-private collaboration?
For a UK university, there are many advantages of working with the private sector, such as leveraging their agile business approach and established recruitment staff and networks nationally and globally. For instance, Navitas currently operates in 33 countries with over 6000 employees. This allows the university to not only increase, but also to diversify, its existing international recruitment market with limited financial and staffing investment and risk. At the same time, it potentially facilitates co-opetition. Usually, one private provider works with several universities in the UK and often globally, so one in-country-based recruitment staff could represent ten different universities at a marketing event in China or India, rather than ten recruitment staff flying from the UK to represent their institutions in China or India respectively. The UK government’s International Education Strategy in 2021 also put the pathway providers on the map as an essential facilitator. The emerging acceptance of public-private collaboration on IPC or exclusive recruitment contracts theoretically crafts a more sustainable business model for all, as well as ascribing to environmental sustainability to reduce carbon emissions by cutting down the international travel of staff. International pathway courses also gives access to motivated and intelligent international students, who come from a different educational system or with lower English language proficiency, an opportunity they otherwise would not have.
The widely recognised social and cultural reproduction theory by French sociologst Pierre Bourdieu argues that privileged individuals and groups always maintain and reproduce their positions through generations by shaping and influencing major institutions, such as quality education. For instance, access to private education before university will yield a higher chance for students to be enrolled on higher-ranked and more reputable universities. Most students from Nigeria or India are mature students, who themselves or whose family have had to work and save for years to invest in their education. This is their second chance in life and their investment into their future and their children's future.
However, paradoxically, recruiting students with lower prior academic and English language skills is sometimes perceived as of lower quality, subsequently, contradicting with or even damaging the reputation and branding of the partner university internationally. The true success of an IPC between the public and private needs to ensure that:
- it can deliver the agreed quantity but also a diversity of international students;
- students on IPC are equipped, linguistically, academically and culturally, to progress onto their chosen degree studies;
- the collaboration strengthens the branding and reputation of the two parties.
Bridge of education and life opportunity
With the number of international students dramatically increasing in the UK for the last two years, the landscape of international pathway provisions has also witnessed a shift in the sector. Before the launch of the graduate route policy, international students coming from Southeast Asian countries, and in particular, China, were the main representation of international pathway students, studying foundation and pre-master courses. Academically, only a limited number of UK universities recognised the high school qualification or equivalent in China, or international students could not meet the direct entry requirements.
Pre-master courses also serve as an entry route for international students with associate degrees or diplomas obtained in their home countries, equivalent to Level 5 in the UK, before they can progress onto Postgraduate studies in the UK. In addition to subject preparatory courses, usuallythe pathway courses also focus on improving the English language proficiency of international students, as well as serving as a transition phase for international students to adapt to the UK educational teaching pedagogies when and if they come from a different educational background. Through such preparatory courses, they can gain their appropriate academic qualification (L3, L4 or L6) and/or language skills, research and academic skills.
Razan Ibrahim, a Jordanian student on an international pre-master course says that “taking this pre-master course has been an exceptional choice” that has had a positive impact on his personal and professional development. “It seems that I have taken a proactive step towards achieving my dreams and goals, and it has already opened unexpected doors for me. Throughout this year, I had the opportunity to develop my academic skills and gained a deeper understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, as well as allowing me to make improvements where necessary. Additionally, this has helped me to improve my critical thinking, creative thinking, and problem-solving skills. Based on the improvements that I can see and feel now, it has enabled me to analyse the environment surrounding me better and gives me the opportunity to work on what I am passionate about,” he adds.
The grade inflation within the sector and improved English language proficiency of most international students allude to a lower entry requirement, which is coupled with deliberate strategies and activities undertaken by universities to attract international students in the competitive market to compensate for the loss of UK home recruitment and stagnating tuition fee for home students, such as intensive pre-sessional English courses for students with lower language skills. Some universities promote to increase students’ English language proficiency through pre-sessional English course from IELTS 5.0 to 6.5, or IELTS 5.5 to 7.0 within 15 weeks. It might be worthwhile for some universities to assess the effectiveness and possibility of this internally, as some researchers and practitioners have raised their concerns.
With universities’ reliance on international student for its financial sustainability, sophisticated strategies are created to compete in a very competitive market, nationally and internationally. This consequently means that there would be a shrink in the market demand for pathway courses, being squeezed at all ends. However, during the last two years, we have witnessed a significant increase in the intake of international pathway students from countries such as Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, and the Middle East, coupled with overall increase of international students in the sector.
However, this sizable increase in student population from different backgrounds poses the sector with new opportunities but also challenges it to fully understand their needs, academically, culturally, and socially so they receive appropriate support.
To research or to teach
What is the nexus between teaching and research? For decades, there have been debates aboutthe correlation between being a researcher and a lecturer, and whether being good at research can lead to becoming a better teacher, or vice versa.The widely accepted norm is that there is little correlation. It could be argued that research into the needs of this group of international students on pathway programmes could be carried out by researchers who are not teaching them personally. But who will be responsible for continuously integrating the emerging needs of students? It is a question of how a university meaningfully implements the so-called research-led teaching practice.
Dave Amor, Director at Higher Insights and former Director Market Intelligence and Insight at INTO, comments, “At INTO, I was responsible for monitoring and improving student experience and student success for over 6 years. Both were core to company strategy. Engaging with the university partner on curriculum design and to review student performance to graduation were vitally important in ensuring the pathway programmes were delivering long-term value to the student and partner, not simply progression to a degree programme. Good Honours was the ultimate benchmark for our undergraduate students, with some partners seeing the vast majority of our pathway students going on to receive firsts and 2:1s. We found integrating English language learning into academic content important for effective learning and student motivation. There’s always room to improve, but having mechanisms for assessing experience, outcomes and reviewing best practice is essential to delivering a high quality experience that improves outcomes for all.”
Equally, the university chooses to engage with the private sector to leverage the business success of the private sector, rather than its subject knowledge or research skills. IPC is part of the university. This encourages partner university in taking up a bigger remit of its academic delivery, providing the subject and research rigour and wider access. This will create a closer collaboration between two parties in ensuring the quality and student experience and in delivering the research informed teaching practice that the marketing literature promotes.
Therefore, to ensure the rigour of a teaching and learning community, as part of a university’s qualification, it is imperative to incorporate research activities as one key agenda of IPC to invigorate and continuously enhance the teaching and learning as well as international students' experience.
Student support
Typically, on a public-private IPC, irrespective of the physical location, the separated operation of IPC presents its opportunities and challenges. On the plus side, there would be dedicated resources to provide bespoke support to students, so that this dedicated resource could reach out to a wider group and individual’s needs.. Furthermore, the student support is far more comprehensive and personalised in comparison to the offerings at a university. On the flip side, the separation and isolation from the wider university community create asense of being an "outsider”. It can also sometimes leading to students feeling inferior because they require more academic support. As a potential solution, consideration could be given to facilitate earlier collaboration between pathway students with degree students, home and international, as well as staff on pathway delivery with university academics. This would allow students to have an earlier taste of their chosen university and degree studies. Staff could collaborate with academics from the university, resulting in a deeper sense of community and affiliation with the hosting or partner university.
What does the future hold?
Working as a joint venture, the private provider carries the responsibilities of its brand but also the university's reputation. According to Ruth Arnold, Executive Director of External Affairs at Study Group and previously Director of Public Affairs at The University of Sheffield, understanding and respecting this responsibility is crucial.
“What universities and pathway providers share in common is a commitment to supporting students from around the world to thrive in their education. An organisation like Study Group differs from a university in that its full expertise is focused on international students from the very beginning of identifying the right university and country choice, through to developing the skills they will need to progress onto their studies and succeed in them. But at its best there can be an absolute overlap of purpose which then enables the university to admit students who are well prepared to succeed academically and to underpin the university’s aims in both teaching and research, along the way bringing to the university all the advantages of the wide range of perspectives which are so precious to its international community,” explains Arnold.
Equally, the university should also take responsibility to support the partner and its staff and students and, as trust grows, this is the case. “A strong relationship between a university and pathway provider is not only one of a supplier of services,” says Ruth Arnold. “It is a strategic partnership in which a shared understanding of challenges opens up discussions about how to do things better, including the potential for additional academic and student wellbeing support, new applications of technology, a greater focus on employability and support for activities overseas. And occasionally it may mean coming together with the higher education sector to actively lobby for the policies which support and welcome the international students who are essential to the success of each.”
The current successful public-private venture IPC model represents one of many emerging cross-sector collaborations and co-opetition, including the TNE delivery, the branch campus in the UK, OPM digital education, outsourced international admissions, exclusive international student recruitment and joint ventures in students’ accommodation. When UK universities are forced to run as a business, this could be a turning point to see further public-private collaborations in the future.