February 2019: Data Migration

Hot take: Eventually, there won’t be any chief data officers (CDOs) left who have built their data departments from scratch. 

That won’t happen for a while, because although the CDO role is becoming more common across the industry, there are still plenty of hold-outs. Eventually, though, all newly minted CDOs will inherit an office and an infrastructure and a strategy. That future reality makes my discussion with Gary Goldberg, Mizuho’s first-ever CDO, all the more enlightening. Goldberg wrote his own job description and entered the role with a clear blueprint that integrates IT strategy for effective, innovative data management. He generously reveals what he did, how he did it, and what data challenges he will tackle next.

To read about a project that is considerably less meticulously organized, do not miss our comprehensive investigation of the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), as reported by James Rundle and Anthony Malakian. They outline the extensive delays, missed opportunities and misguided decisions that have plagued the CAT so far, with a gimlet view of what is likely to happen next.  

In conversations with data managers—especially standards evangelists—about their challenges, they frequently mention fragmentation, wherein underlying technology, and the data aligned to it, are built and managed vertically, creating silos that inhibit data’s flow and create duplication of efforts. 

As the roles of data and technology have evolved within financial services, here at WatersTechnology, we’ve noticed some striking parallels to those fragmentation challenges. Specifically, some of the divisions we had created in our editorial approach—such as reference vs. market data and data vs. technology—were starting to feel artificial, as data and technology’s roles become ever-more-firmly entwined. And so, like a good CDO, we fine-tuned our strategy, resulting in a restructured website revealed last year, and now, a relaunched print publication. This is the final issue of Inside Data Management, and our essential, exclusive data content will now appear  in a rebadged version of Waters magazine (while continuing to publish online first, of course). 

We editors have carefully discussed how to maximize the talents of our driven, skilled journalists, and as if to underscore how first-rate they are, the reporters have delivered an excellent final issue of IDM. In addition to the stories mentioned above, we have features on data sharing in a worst-case-scenario Brexit, environmental, social and governance (ESG) data for fixed income, and winning strategies for alternative data providers in an ever-more-crowded playing field, as reported by alt data consumers. 

Max Bowie—original editor of IDM and now managing editor of WatersTechnology—also provides a farewell tribute to IDM that is part history lesson, part love letter and an exclusive preview of what’s to come.