Rewiring the Data Management Brain

Part of thinking about data management on a regular basis is thinking about the management part of that concept. There are volumes of business school texts on how to better manage people, better manage companies and, yes, even better managing financial data. There are also plenty of business periodicals that tackle these questions.

What's behind the best of these texts (Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap and Others Don't, by Jim Collins, is one that comes to mind) is serious thought and examination about how people function and operate, and how that plays out in their actions, particularly their style of management.

When I can find time, I'm working my way through Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, by David Eagleman, a bestselling non-fiction study from 2011 that goes even deeper into precisely these questions. Early in the book, Eagleman explains how the brain processes signals from the eyes to generate the sense of vision we can take for granted. His explanation has applications for data management, believe it or not.

"As your eyes interrogate the world, they are like agents on a mission, optimizing their strategy for the data," Eagleman writes. "Even though they are ‘your' eyes, you have little idea what duty they're on. Like a black ops mission, the eyes operate below the radar, too fast for your clunky consciousness to keep up with."

That sounds a lot like high-speed automated securities trading, operating too fast for humans to follow in all its complex detail. This passage also reflects how the brain automatically parses the data it receives, which sophisticated data management systems do in similar fashion for the financial industry.

A couple potential new pathways for data managers to follow have appeared on our horizon lately. First, applying wikis to heighten the quality of data by enabling multiple parties to revise it, as was covered in one of our most recent features. Second, and similar to wikis, crowdsourcing of data is also emerging as a new method.

CrowdComputing Systems (CCS), the maker of the WorkFusion platform facilitating crowdsourcing of business process work, is exploring this. Crowdsourcing, as Max Yankelevich, founder and CEO of the company, which began in 2010, defines it, applies assembly line organization to data services production.

"For a process that collects dividend information from public companies in all countries, it's a very expensive proposition for a company to do that globally," he says. CCS splits the work into "micro tasks," where one freelance worker may specialize in reviewing a certain type of financial statement or understanding certain types of dividends in certain countries. This effectively paves a completely new set of neural pathways that comprise the reference data management brain, with each nerve center being all the more capable and sophisticated.

"The enterprise shouldn't care where the labor comes from," says Yankelevich. "If they need dividends and bond reference data terms and conditions connected, they should be able to launch something and get that information back without getting into the nitty gritty of recruiting and hiring."

Just as Eagleman pursues better ways for the brain to function, or better understanding of how the brain functions by investigating how it handles stimuli data, so may the financial industry improve how it functions by investigating these new means of handling the available data, coming from more than a single static source.