Justin Heller, SVP and Chief Data Officer (CDO) at Synchrony Financial, speaks with Kasriel Kay, Data Democratization and Maturity Specialist at Velotix, in a video interview about the role of the CDO, being outcome-driven, data democratization, and integrating data management into business.

Heller has held the CDO role at Synchrony for nearly a decade. With a career rooted at the crossroads of business and technology, he developed a deep interest early on in how metadata can be leveraged to automate processes.

What is the role of a Chief Data Officer?

Heller underscores the foundational importance of understanding data and governance. Speaking on the CDO role, he says, “I believe my role as the Chief Data Officer is to help an organization know what data it has and what it means and where it’s located and how it got there.”

According to Heller, the critical questions that form the basis of effective data management include

• What data is being used?
• Who is accountable for it?
• How reliable is it?
• Is it safe to use?
• How and when should it be disposed of?

Ensuring the full traceability of data from inception to disposal is, in his view, a core part of the CDO’s mandate and is ultimately his role.

Next, Heller acknowledges the operational complexities posed by the growing scale of data. He stresses the need for automation and leveraging of AI to manage this increasing load effectively.

“My vision has always been to have a self-documenting data ecosystem that’s able to keep up with the rate and pace of change without having to add hundreds of people,” says Heller. 

He also points to the importance of accessibility, emphasizing that every employee should be empowered to easily discover and understand data: “Such that there is a centralized way, could be federated, but at the end of the day a mechanism that every employee has the ability to easily find out all the answers to the questions that my role is supposed to help answer.”

Focusing on outcomes, not tools

When asked how KPIs are determined when it comes to new tools, Heller speaks of shifting the mindset away from tools and toward outcomes. He states, “The tool is utilitarian for achieving a specific outcome.”

He advises his team and others in the industry to resist placing too much emphasis on the tools. Instead, “The goal should be about the outcome trying to be achieved and not the tool.”

According to Heller, there’s a tendency in the industry to chase new technologies without fully considering the operational demands they bring: “There’s a lot of opportunity to build and create things or add new tools, but if that’s the mindset, it overlooks what’s required to really operate the tool ongoing to achieve the outcomes.”

To ensure sustained success, Heller adopts a process-centric approach, particularly when addressing business problems. He evaluates the necessary capabilities across the four key dimensions: people, process, data, and technology.

When approaching a challenge, he considers:

• Do the current processes support the intended outcome?
• Are there gaps that require updates to existing workflows?
• Are the right people in place, and are they properly trained?
• Can the team scale alongside the growth of the business?
• Are the appropriate tools and data available and aligned?

“I look at all these opportunities to help either protect the organization or grow an organization in the context of what it takes to build, operate, and sustain a process with people, technology, and data,” Heller adds.

In terms of return, he defines objectives and key results, where objectives are the outcome and the key results feed into the return. Heller opines, “The headline is, what are we trying to achieve, and how do we know that we’ve achieved it from a measurable, successful point of view?”

Empowering through data democratization

For Heller, data democratization is all about giving employees the autonomy to access and utilize data without reliance on intermediaries. He describes it as “the full self-service empowerment of an employee.”

This empowerment, Heller says, enables individuals across an organization to independently answer essential data questions such as what information exists, what it means, where it resides, how it was generated, and what is currently using it. “So that anyone in the organization has the ability to answer the questions that they need answered,” he adds.

Heller notes that the goal is to eliminate the struggle of data discovery and manual curation. “We’ve provided capabilities that put it in the palm of everyone’s hands. To me, that’s true data democratization.”

However, achieving this vision requires more than just access. Heller underscores the need for widespread data literacy and a shared language across the organization.

He points out, “We finally have a technology that can interact with us in the language that we use and have the responses make sense.”

Using a metaphor, Heller says, “Democratization is putting the keys into everyone’s hands to drive the vehicle.” However, he cautions that this also means ensuring individuals are properly trained, and this is where data governance plays a crucial role.

“Data governance can act as that training or the catalyst to help empower employees to raise their acumen and literacy so that self-servicing becomes the norm. Governance’s role is not a policing role, but a servicing adoption role of support and to help,” Heller adds.

Integrating data management into the business ecosystem

The role and perception of data management can differ widely across organizations, says Heller. However, he believes that it is critical to deemphasize data management as a project for it to become part of the sustainable ecosystem. Rather than viewing data management as an isolated initiative, Heller advocates for embedding it into broader business strategies. He ensures that it supports specific outcomes rather than driving efforts in isolation.

Reflecting on his decade-long tenure in the same organization, Heller states that data management is a means to an end. Concluding, he says, “Our roles as data practitioners are to help everyone else with the data. And it’s not a data management project. It is part of how you do business.”

CDO Magazine appreciates Justin Heller for sharing his insights with our global community.