“Opening the Black Box” is our ongoing series on the data treatments, assumptions, and methodologies behind our analyses. In this series, we answer frequently asked questions on how we build, validate, and make decisions about our data.
Thoughts or feedback for us? We welcome it.
As a data and insights firm serving institutional investors globally, collecting, contextualizing and validating data underpins everything CEM does. Over the next several blogs in this series, we will take you inside each CEM’s governance; the philosophy behind our data principles, the committee that owns them, the reporting standards we apply, and the role subscribers play. In the future, we will also share more on where we are headed.
Governance at CEM took a significant step forward in 2025, when CEM established our Data Governance Committee and approved our first Data Governance Policy.
The Data Governance Committee’s mandate
The Committee’s role is to ensure consistency, accountability, and discipline across all data decisions. It ensures that our taxonomy and definitions are applied consistently, that validations are standardized across products, that data treatments and methodologies comply with our policies, that escalation processes exist for complex situations, and that our data policy remains current with industry needs.
The Committee also takes direct input from each of our product-specific Client Advisory Boards, which are represented by a subset of long-tenured CEM subscribers. These are senior leaders who meet quarterly to review the direction of our products and governance standards. In the most recent cycle, the Advisory Boards approved the methodologies behind our Data Scorecards. Their involvement is structured, substantive, and ongoing. We will cover the full picture of how subscribers participate in data governance later in this series.
The Committee owns CEM’s foundational data principles and our data governance policy. Those principles, all eight of them, cover everything from how we treat incomplete data to how we protect confidentiality and respond to security incidents. We walked through each one in detail in a recent blog.
The Data Governance Committee’s structure and mandate
The Committee comprises senior leaders across product, operations, technology, and client coverage. These are people with deep institutional knowledge of how CEM works and the basis for our methodologies
In addition to the committee, there are clear data owners across CEM and a dedicated Data Quality Manager who holds delegated accountability for day-to-day governance decisions. Peer group exceptions, methodology overrides, and model changes all escalate through defined approval chains. This ensures your data and reporting are treated with the same care and discipline we apply across the entire subscriber base.
CEM’s Data Governance Policy
CEM’s data principles and data governance framework, which constitutes the Data Governance Committee, is outlined in CEM’s Data Policy. The policy is an official document that is reviewed annually and includes the foundational principles that CEM upholds for data integrity, the responsibilities of data owners and decision makers, and the parameters under which responsibilities cascade down at CEM.
CEM upholds data integrity, the responsibilities of data owners and decision makers, and the parameters under which responsibilities cascade down at CEM.
The policy builds on a structured RACI framework (RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed). The framework defines who makes decisions, who executes them, and who needs to be kept in the loop. It eliminates ambiguity and ensures that no material decision about your data is made unilaterally or informally.
Our committment to you
The trust our subscribers have placed in us over the years, many for close to a decade without interruption, is something we take seriously.
If you have ever had a question about how a specific data point was treated in your reporting, we encourage you to reach out. That is exactly the kind of conversation this series is designed to open.
We look forward to hearing from you. If there is a question you would like us to address, please reach out to us at insights@explorecem.com.
This blog is part of our “Opening the Black Box” series. If you’d like to receive new posts in your inbox, please click here to subscribe.