Witad Awards 2021: Exchange professional of the year—Diane Schmidt, LSEG

When Diane Schmidt joined the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) in June 2018, she was assigned the mammoth project of developing and executing a comprehensive data governance strategy. Within those short 32 months, as director of data governance, she has built out a global data governance team of nine people and established LSEG’s first Group Data Policy, which sets out global standards and guiding principles on how data should be managed across the firm. Her efforts required senior level discussions and buy-in from the top to convince the entire organization to rethink its approach to data. “Getting the policy signed off by the board and instantiating the standards that supported that policy was the beginning of the program,” she says.

The Group Data Policy was approved by LSEG’s executive committee in July 2020, and since then Schmidt has led the training of all group staff. As part of the education program, she set up an internal microsite, known as the group’s data governance center, where staff can access information, tools, and training resources. The new framework places data at the heart of all corporate decision-making and requires that all regulatory and commercial commitments on data completeness, timeliness and accuracy be met.

Schmidt has implemented new metrics tool, called a Policy and Standards Review, which serves as a series of checks and balances to ensure the data policy is accurately applied. Today, because of her efforts, the data governance team now holds a key role in the design, production, and adoption of LSEG technologies. “We have a seat at the table during the pre-design of change [or new solutions], to be able to invoke direction and guidance for projects to conform with our policy and standards,” she says.

In the third quarter of 2020, LSEG went live with Collibra, a data governance toolkit featuring business glossary and data catalogue functionality. The tool is used to input and track core metadata and data values for data lineage.