Voya Financial, SVP, Head of Data Management: Public Cloud Gives Companies the Ability to Fail Fast

Peter Ku: Thank you, everyone, for joining us. My name is Peter Ku. I'm the Vice President and Chief Industry Strategist for Informatica. Joining me here today is Julia Bardmesser. Julia is the head of enterprise data and architecture and CRM development at Voya. Julia, nice to see you again. 

Julia Bardmesser: Nice to see you, Peter.

Ku: To begin, and to help the audience know a little bit about you, tell us about your role —  what does the Head of Enterprise Data and Architecture and CRM development of Voya do? 

Bardmesser: Voya Financial is a financial services company, and they have three main businesses — health solutions, wealth solutions, and investment management. Overall, the main driver for the business is to provide solutions and products that help all of our customers — companies or individuals — make the best financial decisions, wherever they are in their life journey or in their company journey. I started at Voya three and a half years ago, and the main driver for me coming over was a business driver. One of the attractions of the job for me is to drive the development of data analytics and digital capabilities that drive business strategy. I came from two large banks, and a lot of the data programs at the time in the large banks were focused on regulatory compliance and regulatory drivers.

There is an enormous amount of value of force in complying with the regulations and building up data programs and data management, data governance, roles and responsibilities across the banks. But building data capabilities and enterprise architecture capabilities to drive business value has been a very interesting ride at Voya that continues. There is something new every day that comes across my desk and there is a lot of work to do.

Ku: I know you guys are busy, and I know that Voya has been on a journey itself. I remember when we spoke to Voya about the previous organization and they went through their transformation and branding, and this term “digital transformation” that we hear all over the place. We see that digital transformation, like data governance and other focus areas, is a journey. So, looking back at your experience driving digital transformation initiatives across financial services and even there at Voya —  if you could turn back time, knowing what you know today, what would you do differently and why? 

Bardmesser: That's a very good question. I started thinking about it more from the technology perspective, and then, based on the majority of challenges and opportunities I have seen, I’ve moved to thinking that It's more cultural than technical. And I'm a technology person. I started as a developer. So for me, technical solutions — how you solve problems through tools or development or code or data —  are in my DNA and that's my comfort zone. But what I have realized over time around digital transformation is that culture is the first and the main driver for enabling digital transformation. And I want to dig in a little bit into that because my definition of digital transformation is very broad. It's "Changing the operations of the company end to end, to meet the customers where they are and to understand where the customers are so we can meet them." And it's a reduction of friction — again, end to end —  for all of the operations in the company.

So, we're starting with our digital experience on the website or the app on the phone or our financial reporting. It's still a reduction of friction across the entire enterprise. And if you think about where customers are, that's to know where they are in your data. So, it's a digital experience; it's beyond the CX experience. It's data enablement of meeting the customer, internal and external, on where they are and removing friction from the experience, internally and externally. 

Ku: And I’ll tell you that in the financial services industry, we can all agree, everything is digital. And every part of the business, from the front and the middle to the back office, is data-driven, with  data obviously being critical.

Through the years, we've seen the investments organizations make in the way they run their business. Now, you and I know there are a lot of ongoing investments to modernize financial services. And many of the investments companies are making, whether it's analytics or core business applications like CRM solutions — even the core systems themselves,  payment systems, core banking systems —  are now cloud-native, or what we call cloud-first … cloud obviously being where the innovation is.

But as you know, there's a risk with reward when it comes to investing in modernizing and continuing to invest more in the cloud. From a data management and a data governance perspective, what do you see as some of the biggest data management, data governance risks as more companies continue to modernize to the cloud in this industry?

Bardmesser: I've gone through several hot topics or things that revolutionize the industry. So I remember way back — probably eight years ago at some industry dinner — the biggest topic of conversation was how dope big data investment was, how it was going to be completely different. And there were data executives at that dinner, and somebody said, “Yeah, we've completely mismanaged our small data. So now we can move on to the big data and mismanage the data there.'' That stuck in my mind for a long time.  Big data Hadoop was supposed to solve a lot of the problems that they were trying to handle and solve; it was supposed to make everything much easier, and you wouldn't need to do all of those pesky data governance, data management activities because big data would just miraculously solve all of those problems and provide you solutions out of the box. 

I find the conversation about the public cloud being the same. That it's going to be a miracle solution, and we will not have to do the same level of data governance and data management tasks on the cloud because the cloud, magically, will have capabilities and tooling that will just give us what we need, when we need it, and exactly the way we need it.  

Not really. There are no miracles, unfortunately. I wish there were, but there aren't any. And the public cloud? As one of my friends said a couple of years back, "It's just somebody else's data." Yes, you'll have more tools. You'll have more people, you'll have more opportunities to leverage other people's IP. It's a lot easier and faster. And you'll have a lot more opportunity for agility if you set up your public cloud strategy and the footprint correctly. So, there are a lot of losses in terms of the agility and being able to bring new solutions to the market and to be able to try things out much faster. Also, I think, what the public cloud really gives to the companies is the ability to fail fast.

Ku: It's interesting you say that, because the magic promise of these data issues somehow just disappearing, or not existing, as organizations invest in cloud — that doesn't happen. And I know that many organizations, as they look to modernize or replace their business applications or their analytics by investing in new, modern cloud solutions, sometimes forget about the gaps and challenges they have with regard to rationalizing, identifying, and knowing what data they need to move to and from the cloud, on-prem, or from cloud to cloud. And that includes, of course, being able to ensure that you can track the lineage, making sure the data is secure and that you're complying with all the regulations out there that you have to deal with.