Earlier this month I had the pleasure of representing Okera, as one of the partners of the 2019 MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (MITCDOIQ) Symposium in Cambridge, MA.
This was the first time Okera was attending the symposium and we were made to feel incredibly welcome. As the organizers told us, they were focused on quality over quantity, and this was definitely reflected by the strength of the conversations we had over the three days. We really got the sense that this was an intimate gathering of Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and other Data professionals who were focused on knowledge sharing. Chief Data Officers were keen to learn from each other, and as one of the attendees exclaimed during a session “we want your war stories!”.
- Three Pillars needed to secure a Modern Data Platform
- Using a “Design-to-Value” Approach
- Call to Automation
1. Three pillars needed to secure a Modern Data Platform
- Discoverability – understanding what data you have and where the sensitive data lives
- Accessibility – defining and enforcing access policies on your data, and ensuring de-identification and compliance
- Visibility – Understanding the usage of your data across the platform (e.g how many users, what datasets are they querying…)
You can imagine these pillars working together and informing each other, enabling the business to make better decisions regarding the management of their data. For example, once you know what data you have (Discoverability) and start to understand how people are using it (Visibility), you can design effective access policies (Accessibility)
2. Using a “Design-to-Value” approach
This segues into my next key takeaway: using a “Design-to-Value approach” – a phrase I’m borrowing from the session “Data Strategy Execution and the Enterprise Data Platform” by PwC. A key concern that emerged in several sessions was “How do you demonstrate the ROI of your data platform investments?”. A Design-to-Value approach means identifying the highest priority use cases in your organization and working to enable them through change management, education and training, and finally new tooling. Demonstrating these key wins establishes the CDO’s office as subject matter experts and encourages teams and business units to come to them early in their use case design.
3. Call to Automation
Although CDOs are expressing a strong desire for automation, vendors have a difficult prioritization challenge to face. Meaningful, and truly intelligent automation takes well-trained models, and that naturally takes resources.
Summary
Overall we had an incredibly valuable experience at the MIT CDOIQ Symposium, and it was a pleasure to participate and meet everyone. If you’re looking to enable an agile data platform in your organization, we’d love to talk to you about Okera can partner with you on this (also happy to share our war stories!).