Experian Consumer Services, Chief Data Officer: Cataloging Is The Starting Point Of Data Governance

(US and Canada) Ali Khan, Chief Data Officer at Experian Consumer Services speaks with Michael C Fillios, Founder and CEO of IT Ally, about his professional journey, the mission fuelling ECS, benefits of mentorship, and challenges concerning data governance.

Speaking of his previous company Helm, Khan calls it a research and data-driven company that analyzes the political, healthcare, and financial inequalities existing in the society,  and aims to build participatory democracy. His job role there was to understand how people make decisions based on the mentioned factors and how to change them for the better. He did that by learning from elections and through general civic engagement, and by further accumulating all the data from such interactions.

He reckons thinking about the different forms of inequalities during his time at Helm, and how the COVID situation made it extremely important to address the inequalities, particularly, financial inequality.

Quoting his older child he says, "Money cannot guarantee happiness, but it definitely can eliminate several sources of misery." To that, he adds, "Financial inclusion isn't the be-all and end-all of equality, but it goes a long way to being there."

He further connects the dots here and says that Experian as a customer services company strives to create financial power for all. The mission is to help people who haven't had help before, to minimize financial inequality. 

Emphasizing the importance of a mentor, Khan recalls his experience at IBM, during the early phase of his career. He talks about the knowledge management aspect at  IBM and affirms how IBM was avant-garde in terms of being remote-friendly. But most importantly, he remembers the well-built mentoring culture there. 

"I realized that this was not just something that was a result of academic training and  it was a profession in the sense of being a mentor and a mentee, being an apprentice and then a journeyman moving forward to mastery," he says.

Khan mentions how he has benefitted from having mentors, especially senior architects who compelled him to think in new ways. He dedicates his learnings to the mentors at IBM, who taught him to question assumptions, legacy, and infrastructure driving to create out-of-the-box solutions.

He highlights that mentoring is an essential requirement at Experian where agility is the prime driving force. "Products launch from just an idea to the market," says Khan. 

He sheds light on Experian Boost that allows consumers to add additional data to their credit files to improve their credit score and states that the boost has contributed 90 million points since its inception, helping the under-resourced community with credit access. He refers to this as a start-up environment in terms of action, and mentoring plays an important role here.

Khan then moves forward to discuss the data governance journey of Experian and says "Part of the challenge and opportunity of Experian is that it's highly federated. We have distinct units which have incredibly rich and well-curated datasets. Having a federated model creates opportunities to combine the datasets, resulting in value addition for customers.”

Emphasizing the importance of cataloging data, Khan states, "Cataloguing is incredibly important. That is the starting point for any data governance." The focal concern here is understanding the state of data infrastructure in terms of management and recognizing the datasets as assets. 

He ensures that data ownership is not a concern at Experia as they are well aware that data is not entirely technology and that customers are the real owners of certain data. He pinpoints the idea of consumer permission data which maintains that customers will have to permit the company, to access the data. 

He further mentions that it is the responsibility of the steward is to curate the data keeping in mind, the quality rules and expectations enveloping the data. Considering these as 'fairly standard' challenges, Khan assures that Experian Consumer Services commits to resolving such challenges on priority.

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