Last week I was at the Chief Data Officer Summit in New York. I really enjoyed meeting with several chief data officers, data governance managers, and other data management professionals from all different industries. I find these events a good source for learning and understanding the dynamics of the data governance space as everybody comes together to share their stories and learn from each other. And of course, it’s always such a great feeling to see the name Collibra being used by so many industry leaders as an example to address their case studies.
During the conference, I had the opportunity to meet with Michael Vapenik, the Enterprise Data Governance Officer at American Express. He made a great point explaining how happy they were with the data governance program. The key to their data governance platform is its ability to provide:
- A business-friendly user interface, which makes data governance business as usual
- Interoperability: functionality to tie into the existing data management tools supporting data governance
Michael mentioned the aforementioned reasons led to the selection of a data governance platform, Collibra.
American Express is currently managing the ingestion process around its data lake where they are leveraging data governance to manage what goes into the data lake. Governance is like the toll both for their data lake. It helps to validate where data comes from, who owns it, what it contains, and what its corresponding data quality score is before it moves into the lake. Michael also delivered a great talk on “Building a Data Driven Culture.”
There were many other great presentations at the Chief Data Officer Summit as well. Another one I liked was by Guy Peri, Chief Data Officer, Procter & Gamble (P&G). He mentioned “With more than 5 billion consumers buying its products distributed to over 150,000 retailers, P&G has a lot of data to analyze to build the level of knowledge that can turn products into solutions and insights into actions that better serve their consumers in the 180 countries in which they operate.”
I had the great pleasure to meet with Guy and many other professionals to talk about what we’re seeing in the data governance market and how other clients are leveraging data governance platforms like Collibra to drive analytics and operational excellence. I like that we have a growing community of professionals who are making data governance a top priority to be data-driven.
The fun part of events like the Chief Data Officer Summit is that they provide so much knowledge, especially the freshness of use-cases coming right from some of the fastest growing organizations. It always gives you a feeling of going back home with more information that can be applied to resolve home grown challenges.
What’s your top data priority for the coming year, 2017?
