Data Assets - Fixed or Current?

International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) defines asset is a resource controlled by the entity as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the entity. In this context, "Data is an asset" is an understatement. This cliche note is as widely cited as the reference to analytics as the "new oil", "new electricity"; essentially to depict data as a basic utility without which one cannot sustain a good quality of life. Before the patterns and trends were proficiently leveraged for a myriad variety of challenging tasks from disparate domains, it was often treated as a residual of a software process and a liability to maintain for archival reasons ranging from regulatory compliance to operational transparency, and so on other trivial purposes. Ease of access to data, computing resources and advanced algorithms contributed in varying degrees to this drastic change of perperception from liability to asset. Data governance principles with effective DataOps for the data lifecycle and data curation and tagging for a shared language across the echelons of a data-driven initiative is the necessary backbone. This will aggressively move the data ownership from being a Fixed asset to a Current asset.