(US and Canada) Nate Murray, Chief Data Officer, Fifth Third Bank, speaks with Jason Masker, Field Chief Technology Officer, Stratascale, about the CDO role, leveraging self-service to scale, data ownership, and the obstacles to transformation.

Murray says that Fifth Third’s data approach was reinvented several times based on the strategic initiatives and the goals of the bank and the board. 

He adds that the task at hand now is scaling, and the team has proven that it has the tools and capabilities to do it. The data zones can be expanded while applying data governance capabilities in order to be consumed by reporting teams or others. Murray explains that the entire series of zones define ownership and that data ownership isn’t one person who owns one data element. It includes anyone in the supply chain.

He further explains that self-service and education are the key aspects to getting the bank economies of scale. With the shift to cloud, software and platforms as a service, all industries have to be able to respond in a self-service way.

Murray says that data is the center and the nexus where all business value is realized. Working in data comes with complexities like different languages and storage formats. A key task is to simplify and standardize those, and provide a self-service portal to extract business value at the speed the business needs.

Speaking on the biggest obstacles to transformation, Murray mentions that, of people, process, and technology, technology is the easiest but the key part is process. The best tool and the smartest people will only ever be as fast as the process is built to allow. 

Concluding, Murray says that things have to be done in a streamlined way so that the analysts in the business can extract value at the speed needed because the process already takes care of the difficult part.