Going on the Offense

At this week's Risk Data Aggregation breakfast briefing hosted by Inside Reference Data and sponsored by Numerix and S&P Capital IQ, John Bottega, senior consultant at the EDM Council, urged attendees to take an "offensive posture" (as opposed to "defensive" reaction to regulation) in their data management efforts.

The challenge in trying to take that offensive approach is the number of parties within a firm that all have an ownership interest in the data, as Ulku Rowe, managing director, credit risk technology, JPMorgan, pointed out. "Now, when there is a problem, there are 15 people you have to call, and you're trying to figure out who understands it," she said. "It takes a village of people—but this is a village without a phone book. You need to know who owns the parts of the data."

To go on the offense—and weave through multiple parties who are interested in the data to find the ones who are most relevant—constant assessment is necessary, as Sumanda Basu, senior vice president of internal audit and data governance at Citi, described. "I ask people in my business if they have really spoken to their customers, who may be in enterprise risk, and asked what they want, what particular data they have and what they want from it."

People who are having issues with data are asked if they have really exchanged information about the boundaries of their data and if they have incorporated others' departments into their infrastructure. In many cases, they have not, Basu related. "Data is not there in most of the important developments," he said. "The most important thing is to talk with internal customers in your organization about what they need. Their requirements become your requirements for infrastructure. Take ownership from there."

Numerix chief strategy officer Satyam Kancharla amplifies this thought, saying the major issues are not technology issues, but related to people, processes and incentives. "Tie it back to what the business wants to do and what the business priorities are," he said. "There has to be business sponsorship at the highest level."

Taking an "offensive posture" in data management means consistently thinking about the data issues in terms of the people in the organization with interests in the data, assessing their needs and issues, and directing the data through the mazes that often exist in large organizations.