Data Governance at CDAO Financial Services Conference Boston

Senior level data practicioners talk shop at this year's CDAO!

This April, we were delighted to attend as well as participate in the Financial Services-focused Chief Data & Analytics Officer conference in Boston. This annual gathering brought together senior-level data practitioners in financial services to share their latest innovations, best practices, challenges and use cases. The concept of monetizing or commercializing data assets is revolutionizing the Financial Services industry by using governed data strategies partnered with business initiatives to realize data-driven transformation benefits.

Jodi Morton, Vice President, Single-Family Data Governance & Management at Freddie Mac delivered a memorable keynote on shifting data governance from compliance to analytics. . The foundational element in this transition is the embedded enterprise data dictionary, acting as a truth stone for alignment of business-driven data strategy connected to objectives as well as the underpinning technical manifestations. It’s a heartwarming tale of resource onboarding, one which many of us face, where a new resource has tremendous technical acumen but little understanding of the business itself. Traditionally, this gap is bridged and often shouldered by the delivery team; but Freddie Mac empowered their new-hire with self-paced training heavily leveraging their dictionary and found that, after a few weeks, the team member was ready to have business-facing discussions.

The dictionary is foundational to data acquisition, distribution and analytics functions. It provides the terminology, lineage and intended business usage of the attribute expressed in business terms. By uniting discussions around a common vocabulary, Jody has moved the governance function out of the back office and into the front office. Change management functions integral to an analytics team, communication and awareness, and stakeholder management were fostered and aligned through roadshows and proofs of concepts. Once again, terminology and vocabulary is always business-focused and aligned behind the established, fostered and maturing dictionary. A superb and delightful presentation on an exciting transformational success story: congratulations Jody!

Yours truly and Darryn Noble were staffing the NexJ booth demonstrating our latest NexJ CDAi product. We had the pleasure of connecting with several Data & Analytics Financial Services industry representatives and were surprised at the degree of commonality that they expressed in describing their data and analytics challenges. Provisioning data for analytics projects, especially to the level of a feature store, is in an enormous challenge, and this is what NexJ CDAi is designed to address. Our demo highlighted the importance of a centralized attribute store, removing the need for manual or self-selecting data preparation tools. The built-in computed values remove many of the manual errors attributed to coding data transformation for processing as well. And the graph visualization illustrated interactively not only the benefits gained from relationship insights, but from the end user experience as well. Powerful yet flexible. Many thanks to everyone who dropped by the booth and the new connections that we made; for those of you yet to connect, please ping me on LinkedIn or Twitter!

Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Financial Services Explore and examine the rise of the Chief Data & Analytics Officer and leadership in more depth than ever before. Discuss strategies for building an analytically driven enterprise, defining the role of the Chief Data & Analytics Officer and where they should sit within your business, as well as tactics for demonstrating long term ROI for your business. Attendees were treated to 2 days of premium content tailored to the needs of data analytics executives in financial services. Lively discussion groups, panel sessions and informative keynote presentations explored data analytics applications for risk management, operational excellence, product/service pricing and optimization, marketing, customer analytics and more… See More!

Author: Matthew Bogart

Vice President, Marketing

Matthew is responsible for building awareness for NexJ and demand for its solutions. He regularly engages with analysts, key industry stakeholders, and thought leaders to stay abreast of technology innovation and financial services industry trends and challenges.

Matthew will be sharing his insight and perspective on the enterprise customer management market and the issues affecting the financial services industry today in regular contributions to the NexJ blog. He encourages readers to take part in the conversation or reach out to him directly with their observations on market trends and issues.