The resulting turmoil has given accountants a chance to re-examine their roles in the capital marketplace—and in society more broadly—in this changed environment. Are we doing what we should? Can we do better? Do others understand what we do in this increasingly automated and altered world? The accounting profession had already started a major initiative in 2018 to look at new and emerging opportunities for accountants. Work on this project is continuing and has been escalated, owing in part to the continuing rate of change and in part to the disruption caused by COVID-19.38 Two emerging areas of practice include data governance and economic value creation. We will discuss issues relating to these two areas below.Impact of TechnologyAn icon reads, Data Analytics. As providers of information, accountants identify, measure, and communicate useful information to users. Information is becoming increasingly abundant and available. Trends, including digitization, digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI), and others, have been accelerating at an exponential pace in the last few years (including dramatically during COVID-19, as noted in Illustration 1.9). These are having a profound impact on accounting. As more things are digitized (turned into machine-readable data), there is a corresponding increase in the amount and variety of data (information). This data is often referred to as "big data" due to its volume, the speed at which it accumulates, and the variety of forms in w