Gary Goldberg, chief data officer for Mizuho Securities EMEA, says that the CDO’s job is to answer business challenges around data, a leader to provide clarity and designate direction. “The role of the CDO is to try to navigate those conversations, gain consensus, and in some cases, make the hard calls where consensus can’t be obtained,” Goldberg says.
Jamie Hyman describes how Goldberg made internal accountability the cornerstone of his data strategy in this report published in Waters Technology:
If data sits in one department and never leaves, the pain of anything going wrong resides in that single department. Goldberg wanted to duplicate that effect for data that flows from one department to another, an approach he says was very novel at the time: managing enterprise data at the enterprise level. “In short, we try to ensure that ownership is aligned with the business processes so that the pain of data going wrong is felt by the department responsible for fixing it,” he says.
Any time data moves from one function to another, it’s an interface, whether it’s via an application programming interface (API), an email, a spreadsheet or automated through IT. “We map data lineage through interfaces, and we put controls around interfaces,” Goldberg says.
The data office works closely with IT and maintains a register of interfaces. “No IT team is able to create a new interface without it first being registered with the data office. Once they register this, before it goes into production, the mapping sheets and the documentation around the flows of data get reviewed and governed by the data office. So we can always maintain an understanding of the data flows.”
[…]
Goldberg further enhanced Mizuho’s data strategy by instilling a sense of ownership over each segment of the data flow. “One of the things I did early on was try to put the cost of errors with those who are accountable. If we take trade data and say trades are created in the front office, the front office then has to take accountability and ownership of errors that come out of that,” he says.
“If the burden of fixing those errors resides where it’s created or sourced, you create a natural incentive for those functions to improve.” Conversely, if an office or department can rely on someone fixing or attempting to fix errors downstream, there is no impact on them for getting it wrong in the first place.
“It’s trying to adjust the culture of the organization so that accountability, and the cost of that accountability, will correctly align and when [those accountable] realize the issues that come with errors, there’s a natural response,” he says. “It’s setting up the right conversations to happen.”
