Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, CDO: Data Analytics, Organizational Strategies, and Execution: Connecting the Dots

(US and Canada) Cathy Doss, Chief Data Officer for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, talks with Susan Wilson, VP Data Governance and Privacy Segment, Informatica.

Doss shares that her everyday work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond is making sure that her business has the data they need, that it's easy to find and ready to use.

She says that they often get lost in reports. Her teammates stick Post-It notes on their computers, often with question marks written on them. If they get lost in the jargon of what they are working on, one of them pulls the Post-It note off and sticks it in front of the camera. It's an excellent reminder for all of them to ask "Can the data confirm or deny what's been working?" as well as "What will we do about it?" The answers to those questions, she maintains, are two of the most important things that come out of this exercise.

Value delivery depends on relationships, with data, analytics, organizational strategies, and execution akin to connecting the dots. Doss shares how she is mapping and linking these dependencies to understand the data value chain.

Although everyone talks about data strategy, Doss emphasizes beginning with the business strategy and then how data will support it. She calls this a three-legged stool, the business, the technology, and the data that comes out of that technology, and all of that should support the business strategy.

Doss explains that sometimes one has to help the business put what they're trying to do into that strategy. So one has to, once again, put on the business hat for a while. We may have to line up the data and the technology to support the business and the people in the process. That's why it's critical to understand the business that you support, not just data but the business itself, and where you're trying to get to.

Sharing some examples of value generation that she has delivered with her team, she talks about her work with past organizations, like startups. First, she made sure they tracked every piece of data about everything they did regarding quality. She made sure there were standards in every field to ensure she would not have to go back and fix data just to run a report, do analysis, find the insights, and set it up to test and learn. And that is what direct marketing is all about; what's working, what's not working. So they measured, corrected, and retested.

All of this worked; the startup found a niche in the market and turned itself into a Fortune 500 company. She thinks including that pivotal data piece played a huge role.

Doss says that the best practice for communicating and educating various groups on the value of data and analytics starts with listening and asking excellent questions, not leading with data and analytics. And it's listening to be a business student, to be able to speak like them, think like them and use business-relevant examples.