Managing Risk special report

September 2015 -- Sponsored by Thomson Reuters

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Hand In Hand

When thinking about how efforts to manage risk apply to data management methods, or how data can be better managed to better support risk management, cooperation in many facets of operations is necessary, as expert industry practitioners note in this special report.

Consultant Michael McMorrow, speaking in the Virtual Roundtable, frames the overall emphasis that should govern activities, saying, "Data management and risk management prove to be most effective when they are passionate allies." This means data managers should put themselves in the risk managers' shoes with everything they do, he adds. Often, the information is there on both the data and risk sides that would enable them to interact better, but it is not leveraged, he says.

Larger firms often have achieved their size through acquisition, getting saddled with legacy risk management infrastructure in the process, observes Kate Toumazi of Thomson Reuters. "As a result, many firms have numerous risk data repositories based around these siloed risk management structures," she says. Cooperation is then essential between the managers responsible for each silo, to ensure coordination of risk and data information.

For any size firm, building a data governance model is key to effective data management. As Deloitte & Touche's Ed Hida points out, data stewards with designated domains of certain business units may be even more important to the success of a governance plan than chief data officers. Cooperation between these stewards, similar to what is needed between managers of silos, is another necessity. To be able to respond to data users' feedback on what data should look like requires consistency in ownership, as Aite Group's Virginie O'Shea says in our Q&A. No matter what the data units are, or who is responsible for them, if they are walled off from each other, inevitably risk management will suffer.

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