Gary Goldberg, CDO at Mizuho International, headlined A-Team Group’s recent Data Management Summit in London with a keynote titled ‘Using data to bring the business together’. He talked about the evolution of the CDO role, the power of data and the opportunity for the data office to become a strategic business partner.
Setting the scene for his presentation, Goldberg noted that regulatory compliance tends to win budget in financial institutions and said any investment should be used to deliver a cohesive data strategy rather than maintain data siloes. He said: “There are huge opportunities in our industry that are waiting to be tapped. We have the tools for the task and the CDO 4.0.”
Considering the role of the CDO, Goldberg described version 1.0 of the role as foundational, supporting efficiencies in reporting but with a regulatory focus. Jumping to version 2.5, the role focussed on cost saving, while version 3.0 added revenue generation, added value, analytics and insight. The opportunity for the CDO 4.0 is to become a strategic partner to the business, acting as an internal consultant and using data science and analytics to drive business strategy and chase profitability.
Commenting on the ongoing shift from data governance to analytics as a means of making data more powerful, Goldberg said: “With power comes great responsibility. The first step on the journey has to ask what problem are we solving? Data governance, data quality and compliance are not strategic objectives, we need to use data to drive profitability by increasing revenue, reducing costs, adding social value, decreasing risk, improving brands and moving ahead of competitors.”
Another responsibility is to consider the question of ‘why’ and ‘so what’ before investing in data management tools and processes. Goldberg uses these questions when assessing any investment at Mizuho and provided examples including why invest in data governance, to achieve efficiency; why invest in data standards, to achieve savings; and why source additional data, to increase revenue.
He said using data well will be critical for the future and will allow the data office to facilitate change and process innovation. Analytics will be run on data flows rather than raw data, data flows will be business flows, all data will be gathered, anonymised and analysed, and data will unify business functions.
Goldberg also noted that data will drive business process improvement and make the CDO a proactive partner in the business, rather than a service function. He said: “We will start to drive value for the business and drive business strategy. Knowledge of data and of business will go hand in hand, data will be seen as being less political, and data science and analytics will allow the data model to be extended and used to prove opportunities.”
He concluded: “The evolution of the CDO role to into an internal agent of change will provide career opportunities and remove barriers between the data office and the business.”
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