Finding Mojo : Tale of Chief Data officer...

While every bank is pursuing their digital swag to become a truly digital bank, they are equally increasing their focus on becoming information-centric enterprise.

Off late, Banks are embarking on a transformational journey to make data as a strategic asset by reshaping their business models and introducing data driven culture.

They are looking to build end to end core data management capabilities and hire a data catalyst – aka chief data officer who is expected to bring magical mojo bag to make their digital swag a reality.

In bank’s digital journey, CDO is the new hope in the desperately needed enterprise transformation agenda. Aggregating enterprise wide data for business consumption requires a concerted effort and is all but impossible without a steward and champion of enterprise information management.

Chief Data officer bring dedicated focus and strategy on Efficient and effective management of Data across enterprise. They are expected to craft data strategy, collaborate with business and demonstrate ‘value of information-centric enterprise’ and push data agenda.

Chief Data officer’s Mojo refers to Being Connected, Automated, Uniformed, Trusted, Transparent, Insightful & Efficient.

1. Connected & integrated enterprise aka Data lake
2. Automated & near real time data exchange
3. Uniformity in data governance across LOB
4. Trusted & reliable Data from single source of truth
5. Transparency & lineage across systems
6. Insightful & easy data discovery
7. Efficiency and agility in data operations

Chief data officer finds his mojo in defining data mgt. strategy, guidelines, principles, metrics, organisational structures, and underlying technologies to avoid proliferation of tools. He works with his teams to define semantic modeling methodology around Ontology, taxonomy and business glossary. He creates data ownership guide, data classification maps, introduces best practices in data modeling methodologies ( conceptual, logical, physical), role based decision maps. He also finds his mojo in ensuring best in class data data governance & operations frameworks are defined to modernize the core data foundation and shape the future analytics initiatives.  

Ultimately he/she focuses on Providing trusted data, which is complete, accurate, compliant, consistent, and appropriate, in order to enable enterprise with accurate reporting & actionable insights to deliver enhanced customer experience.

To effect a truly lasting change in a large organization, the CDO must be empowered to organize, engage and lead a team of best of class practitioners.

Digital Banks brings additional complexity in building enterprise data lake by onboarding new data sets coming from social media, audio, video, call centre, complaints, clickstreams etc..  along with existing enterprise data sets like customer, product, pricing, transaction and operational data. Aligning information across Bank’s line of business is both an Operational challenge and a necessity. If it was easy, everyone could have achieved their Mojo and and we wouldn’t need a magical mojo bag of the chief data officer.

It’s chief data officer and his teams who is relentlessly working behind the scenes to make Bank’s digital swag a reality…