Eyes on Data: Valuing Data with Data Asset Foundations

“Data is not just information. It is an asset — and it’s time our laws, markets, and institutions recognized it as such.”

The Invisible, Most Powerful Asset in the Digital Economy

In the 21st century, data is routinely described as the world’s most valuable resource — fuel for artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and modern innovation. In other words, data is power. Yet, despite its strategic importance, data remains curiously unaccounted for.

Unlike intellectual property or software, data lacks formal legal status, a universally accepted valuation method, and a consistent governance framework. This absence of recognition creates friction, legal ambiguity, and lost opportunity across industries.

The result is a structural limitation on innovation, investment, and trust in the data economy.

The Isle of Man’s Data Asset Foundations initiative aims to change that narrative. By establishing the world’s first statutory framework to define data as an asset and embed governance directly into law, the Data Asset Foundations’ program offers a playbook for how jurisdictions can unlock data’s full potential. The EDM Association plays a key role by providing data management expertise along with its globally adopted best practices frameworks to provide data best practices, structure, and governance to the program.

Why Data’s Value Still Doesn’t Count

Despite trillions of dollars flowing through data-driven business models, data itself remains largely invisible on balance sheets. Companies can quantify the worth of patents, trademarks, or brands — but not the value of the data that fuels algorithms, drives personalization, or supports regulatory or ESG reporting.

This lack of legal and financial visibility has broad implications:

Unclear ownership: Organizations struggle to establish who truly controls and can license specific datasets

Inconsistent valuation: Without agreed standards, data’s worth is subjective, limiting its use in finance or M&A

Limited trust: Investors, regulators, and partners hesitate to transact with assets that can’t be transparently governed

“The global economy’s most valuable commodity remains structurally underutilized.”

As a result, data-driven organizations often cannot fully monetize their assets or confidently share them for collaborative or AI-driven use cases. This leads to organizations underutilizing, misunderstanding or even ignoring their data, leaving it locked up to avoid incurring risks. Instead, the opportunity in the digital economy is to guide people to understand that data is an unmatched asset, and that they need to capture its value to unleash unrealized power and new, exciting business opportunities.

A New Model: Data Asset Foundations

The Isle of Man’s answer is Data Asset Foundations — a purpose-built legal and operational structure that allows data to be owned, governed, shared, and monetized responsibly.

Drawing on the Island’s proven Foundations Act, the Data Asset Foundations initiative merges the accountability of a trust with the commercial agility of a company. It has full legal personality, meaning it can own data, enter contracts, license usage, and manage operations independently, while remaining subject to external oversight to ensure accountability.

The Five Pillars of the Data Asset Foundations Framework

Legal Framework
Establishes data as a recognized asset class through statutory definition — enabling consistent treatment in contracts, audits, and financial reporting.
Data Asset Register
A definitive, transparent record of data ownership, provenance, quality as well as rights and restrictions, including consideration for data privacy and protection — modeled on the Island of Man’s established registries such as those for land or ships.
Embedded Governance
Integrates global best practices directly into law, including the DCAM^® (Data Management Capability Assessment Model) and CDMC (Cloud Data Management Capabilities) frameworks developed by the EDM Association.
Standardized Valuation
Introduces consistent, auditable approaches to valuing data — supporting asset-backed lending, licensing, and investment-grade financial planning.
Distribution Platform
Enables compliant, secure, and efficient data sharing through standard contracts, access controls, lineage and interoperability.

Together, these pillars create the foundation for what data professionals have long sought: a credible, auditable, and investable way to manage data as a strategic asset.

From Intellectual Property to Data Assets

To grasp the significance of the Data Asset Foundations model, consider the evolution of intellectual property law. A century ago, economies learned to treat ideas as assets through patents, trademarks, and copyrights. This recognition transformed innovation from abstract creativity into measurable capital and unlocked entire industries.

“Data Asset Foundations do for data what intellectual property law did for ideas — turning innovation into investable value.”

Data is now at a similar crossroads. Yet, unlike IP, data is non-rivalrous — it can be used by multiple parties simultaneously — and dynamic, with its quality and utility changing over time.

Traditional asset laws built for tangible or exclusive property simply don’t fit. Data also carries external obligations such as privacy rights and consent restrictions. These realities demand a new kind of framework: one that is flexible, transparent, and auditable by design.

The Data Asset Foundations model meets that challenge. It combines fiduciary oversight with operational transparency, making data both a commercial asset and a trusted societal resource.

Why DataCo Models Fall Short

In recent years, many enterprises have experimented with “DataCos” — standalone subsidiaries designed to manage and monetize corporate data. The model is conceptually sound but often falters in execution.

DataCos commonly face:

Ambiguous ownership between parent and subsidiary

Lack of enforceable governance across jurisdictions

Unclear valuation that weakens investor confidence and balance-sheet treatment

The Data Asset Foundations initiative addresses each of these gaps. It gives DataCos the legal backbone they have always needed — statutory recognition, registry-backed ownership, and embedded best-practice governance.

Where the DataCo operates in legal grey zones, the Data Asset Foundations operates with regulatory clarity and global credibility.

Why the Isle of Man?

The Isle of Man is uniquely positioned to pioneer this framework. With a long-established reputation for financial integrity and digital innovation, the Island combines business agility and legislative focus with regulatory maturity.

The government’s research into global models — ranging from the UK’s data trust pilots to the EU’s data altruism frameworks — led to a key insight: existing structures like trusts, cooperatives, or Web3 data unions each capture part of the problem, but none solve it entirely.

Data Trusts protect beneficiaries’ interests but lack corporate legal personality

Cooperatives are democratic but inflexible for large-scale data operations

Web3 Data Unions are innovative but face major regulatory and privacy hurdles

The Data Asset Foundations model blends these strengths while eliminating their limitations. It provides:

Legal personality to hold, trade, and monetize data directly

Statutory governance and valuation standards

Transparency through a public register

Applicability to both commercial and public-benefit use cases

“The Data Asset Foundations model bridges trust, transparency, and scalability — qualities most other frameworks can only balance two at a time.”

Data as Foundational Infrastructure

The Isle of Man’s initiative reframes data not as an adjunct of digital business — but as national infrastructure, alongside finance, energy, and telecommunications.

The Data Asset Foundations legislative upgrade to the Foundations Act 2011 will formally define a “data asset,” allowing it to be treated as an asset class and therefore underpin asset-backed lending or securitization.

The Data Asset Register serves as a shared source of truth for provenance, usage rights, consent history, and quality metrics. Within the Data Asset Foundations framework, the Data Asset Register could be considered analogous to a corporate balance sheet in that each serves as an authoritative, auditable representation of owned resources. Whereas a balance sheet expresses assets and liabilities in monetary terms at a specific reporting date, the register provides a structured, continuously maintained catalogue of datasets — recording provenance, ownership, rights and restrictions, quality and valuation attributes, together with stewardship controls. This granular, rights-aware inventory forms the evidentiary basis for financial recognition and valuation of data, informing pricing, risk assessment and collateralization, while the balance sheet presents the resulting aggregates in financial form.

By embedding DCAM^® and CDMC into the Data Asset Foundations’ governance requirements, the framework ensures that ethical stewardship and compliance are not optional features, but statutory obligations.

A Global Template for Responsible Data Economies

The Data Asset Foundations initiative is designed to be replicable across jurisdictions, aligning with international standards to promote cross-border trust and trade.

Governments can adopt or adapt the model to stimulate local data economies. Enterprises can use it to structure data ventures or collaborations. Investors gain a new asset class with transparent valuation and legal clarity.

The model’s significance extends beyond compliance — it creates the conditions for data liquidity in global markets.

“By defining data as a capital asset, the Data Asset Foundations turns governance into growth.”

Unlocking a Trusted Data Marketplace

For organizations, the commercial benefits of the Data Asset Foundations are immediate and tangible:

Reduced vendor lock-in through clear ownership and portability

Audit-ready compliance with global standards embedded in law

Faster innovation cycles enabled by shared, governed data infrastructure

Expanded financing options, as data becomes eligible for collateralization

Creating libraries of high quality of data

Adhering to regulatory requirements regarding the curation and protection of the data asset

By uniting legal, operational, and ethical considerations, a Data Asset Foundation will transform data management from a cost center into a recognized source of enterprise value.

Get Involved: A Collaborative Path Forward

The success of the Data Asset Foundations initiative depends on collaboration. The Isle of Man Government and the EDM Association are inviting participation from across the data ecosystem — enterprises, regulators, and innovators alike.

Engagement opportunities include:

Founding Participants establishing the first registered Data Asset Foundations

Ecosystem Partners supporting valuation, legal, and technical integration

Standards Collaborators contributing to evolving frameworks for governance and value measurement

Early adopters — both data-rich companies and corporate service providers — are invited to participate in the Pilot Program. Together, these participants will shape a trusted, interoperable data economy — one grounded in legal certainty and global standards.

Conclusion: Making the Data Economy Real

For decades, data management professionals have championed governance, stewardship, and quality as essential to business success. Today, the global economy is continuing its shift from ownership of physical goods to stewardship of digital value. But without legal and commercial infrastructure that defines, governs, and values data, that transformation remains incomplete.

The Data Asset Foundations initiative bridges that gap. By embedding EDM Association’s DCAM^® and CDMC into statute, the Isle of Man effectively transforms data management best practice into legal infrastructure. By turning governance into law and valuation into practice, it builds the foundations of a trusted, investable data economy.

In time, this model could do for data what IP laws did for innovation: establish the certainty, accountability, and confidence that enable growth at scale.

The Isle of Man’s and EDM Association’s leadership on Data Asset Foundations demonstrates a simple truth: Data is an asset. And now, there’s finally a framework designed to treat it that way.

Learn More

Download the White Paper about Data Asset Foundations – Unlocking Value from Data: Building an Infrastructure for Data-Rich Companies

Explore more on the EDM Association website and Isle of Man website, including more information about the Pilot Program for data-rich companies and corporate service providers

Explore EDM Association best practice frameworks, including DCAM and CDMC

Please note: DCAM is available exclusively to EDM Association member organizations. Not yet an EDM Association member? Learn about the benefits of membership or contact the team.

This quarter’s column contributed by: 

Jim Halcomb, Chief Research & Development Officer, EDM Association

Jim Halcomb is a strategy, data management, and cybersecurity executive with 30 years of international business experience. Jim leads EDM Association’s Communities of Practice, Best Practices Frameworks (DCAM & CDMC) and Training & Certification programs. 

Agnieszka Ablazej-Strandskov, Head of Data Strategy, Digital Isle of Man

Agnieszka (“Aga”) Ablazej-Strandskov is a seasoned strategist with a background in law who brings over a decade of experience translating complex business and regulatory questions into data-driven, legally sound decisions. Aga is currently playing a key leadership role in developing the Isle of Man’s Data Asset Foundations initiative.

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