Tracy Daniels, Chief Data Officer of Truist
Truist
Over the past couple of months I’ve been embedding myself in the world of Chief Data Officers. I’m working with Amazon Web Services and the MIT CDO/Information Quality Symposium on a report about the role, which is based on both a large survey and 25 interviews. The report will be out early next month, but I thought I’d give a preview of it by focusing on one CDO I interviewed. Tracy Daniels of Truist—the name for the combination of SunTrust and BB&T banks—was the first CDO I spoke with. I thought it might be useful to compare her perspective to some of the other things I learned about contemporary CDOs.
Daniels is female, which fortunately isn’t as unusual in the CDO role as it used to be. In our survey of over 250 CDOs or CDO equivalents, 30% identified as female. She also has a largely technical background, having held, she said, virtually every major job in IT management. Only 29% of CDOs in the survey indicated that they had primarily technical backgrounds. However, Daniels is clearly focused on achieving business objectives, not just technical ones. She certainly would fall into the large majority of CDOs who said they define their success in terms of meeting a combination of business, organizational, and technical objectives. Indeed, she said the views the CDO job as connecting technology and business groups within her organization.
CDOs, particularly those in banks where the role originated, initially defined their jobs as primarily focused on “defense” issues—data protection, risk avoidance, and regulatory compliance. Daniels said:
“The mix of offense and defense can change over time, but you never lose defense in a bank. I try to spend between 25 to 40% of my time on defense, but that can go up if there is a new regulatory or risk issue to be addressed.”
But Daniels is typical of CDOs surveyed and interviewed in focusing increasing amounts of her energy on offense—data-related activities designed to increase revenues and profits, and to improve customer relationships. She is attempting to automate and improve productivity on defense activities so that she and her organization can focus even more on value-added offense work. For example, she is actively using automated data tagging tools, and exploring automated machine learning. Truist even recently acquired a data management solution from a startup called Zaloni, as well as its product development team, to do intelligent and collaborative data cataloging, automated governance, and unified observability of data.
Another big part of offense is the use of analytics and AI to make sense of data and generate insights. The majority of CDOs, according to the survey, are focused on this issue. 66% said a key part of their jobs involves “enabling new business initiatives based on data/analytics/AI,” and 50% said they focus on “producing analytical or AI-based insights for the organization.” Many of the CDOs I interviewed said that they consider analytics and AI the key means for creating tangible value in the job, and are either officially or effectively Chief Data and Analytics Officers, or CDAOs.
While Truist does not have a Chief Analytics Officer, Daniels has recently picked up responsibility for advanced analytics and an AI/machine learning center of excellence to accelerate these capabilities within analytic teams across the bank. Not only are those excellent ways to provide value to the organization, Daniels commented, but they have value relative to data management:
“They sharpen our focus on data consumption. you are forced to think more end to end when you have the analytics role as a CDO. You get to see how people are leveraging the data.”
Data consumption is, for Daniels, a consistent emphasis. She said that it’s traditional for CDOs to focus on other aspects of the data supply chain—data governance and control, creation, movement, and so forth. But data consumption, she believes, hasn’t received enough focus in the past. Now consumption drives much of what they are trying to do in creating data and analytical assets for the organization.
Many CDOs are also focused on creating a data-driven culture. Somewhat surprisingly to me, when CDOs in the survey were asked which activities they focused on with their time commitments, the highest percentage of respondents (72%) selected “data-driven culture initiatives.” Daniels fits well in this group, since she feels that moving the bank’s culture in this direction is an important part of her job. She said:
“A data-driven culture is the glue across our teams. We do data and analytics summits to build community. We also have data literacy training to create a common language and facilitate support and enablement. And we of course have more specific training and upskilling programs on technologies and applications.”
The CDO survey and interviews revealed that more than any other issue, CDOs are focused on making an impact on their companies. Many—39% to be specific—of them are doing so from a “data product management” focus—creating reusable combinations of data, analytics and AI, and managing the process from ideation to ongoing management. Daniels said that Truist already has something of a product focus, but they are trying to formalize the product orientation more.
Consistent with the impact objective, Daniels is heavily focused on effective delivery and deployment of data, analytics, and AI capabilities, and take-up of them by the organization. She summarized that orientation by saying, “Delivery of a capability without adoption doesn’t mean anything to me.” Truist is trying to build metrics and controls into the products they deploy in the bank, so that usage can be monitored and governance built in. Daniels also commented that her teams are trying to be more thoughtful about change management as a means of ensuring successful deployment and usage.
It was clear from my study of CDOs that data can’t be effectively managed or consumed without effective senior data executives leading the charge. Tracy Daniels, the first incumbent I spoke with for the study, helped me realize early on what attributes those executives needed to possess.