Lorraine Waters, Solidatus CDO: Advancing DEI in Technology
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(Europe) Lorraine Waters, Chief Data Officer at Solidatus, speaks with Michael C. Fillios, Founder and CEO, IT Ally LLC, about the C-suite interactions within technology organizations, data security, characterization of modern CDOs, data commercialization, data analytics, and organizational challenges faced by CDOs and how to overcome them.
Waters starts the discussion by explaining the different C-suite interactions and how, despite existing as distinct roles, they are additional shoulders to the organizational wheel. She states that a Chief Data Officer is capable of supporting and servicing digital transformation and analytic roles. Whether it pertains to the CDO’s domain or other C-suite levels, they need to work in coherence. She adds that it is the CDO’s role to make data accessible to analytics and digital teams while prioritizing the security aspect of data.
Waters highlights the importance this role holds in strengthening the role of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Calling the latter a technical role, she states the organization needs to incorporate specialized defenses. A good understanding of data flow through the organization — a data blueprint provided by the CDO — helps the CISO learn the whereabouts of data and if required control measures are maintained. The two roles are interconnected, she states, and the CDO is key to the CISO’s success.
Waters further points out that having a business mindset, product management skills, and data privacy and ethics management are some of the characteristic requirements for a CDO. Waters also firmly believes that to be a skilled and successful CDO, a robust commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is necessary. This not only develops data culture and a talent pool around data management but also incorporates different perspectives to promote better civil data protection among other subjects, she states.
In the context of internal data commercialization, Waters says that data management has been a tax on the business. An effective data management capability and a CDO to market that capability and portray the benefits of good data management are also necessities. She considers data blueprint creation to be a critical tool that helps the CDO process data categorization and cataloging and learn data lineage.
Concerning external data commercialization, she states that there have been numerous attempts to commercialize and make data available across organizations. Some of them have been successful but many have failed due to an organization’s reluctance to share data, often because of data sensitivity or poor data quality. In addition, customers do not want suppliers to increase sales based on their data, and they are becoming increasingly aware of their rights regarding data usage. This, says Waters, has narrowed the opportunities for data commercialization. Based on the developing standards around ESG data, she urges industries to focus collectively on data standardization.
Speaking of SMEs, Waters states that small organizations starting on a data journey may research leading industry bodies like EDM Council, DCAM, etc., for learning data strategies. She affirms that understanding data is easy once the basic foundational knowledge is acquired.
She urges companies to understand business strategies to reap outcomes, and emphasizes the importance of delivering business benefits for consumers and implementing long-term strategies. This is where a practical and commercial-minded CDO is beneficial, she adds.
Regarding the many challenges faced by CDOs concerning data management, Waters notes how certain banks she previously worked with were subject to enforcement action by regulators. She maintains that the focus should have been on preventive controls rather than detected weaknesses. She urges CDOs to create data lineage first, understand the data flow to control weaknesses, and fix them gradually.
She says that financial regulators, as the largest data collectors, have made strides by acquiring all necessary data and disclosures from financial services companies. The regulators and CDOs have come to shake hands on prioritizing proactive, preventive, and sustainable control overriding the hamster wheel of detection and remedy, Waters concludes.
[This content was originally published on cdomagazine.tech.]
