Desirability Of Data Management Strategies

At WatersUSA earlier this week, I was struck by a remark from Steven Totman, financial services industry lead in the field technology office of Cloudera, a big data warehousing platform provider.

Totman said his customers are more excited by the prospect of blending two different data sources to potentially yield a greater insight than by the prospect of saving as much as $60 million by upgrading a data warehouse for greater efficiency and accuracy.

A great insight, in the financial industry, could end up being worth far more than $60 million, but that kind of saving would still be a bird in hand. The result of blending two data sources could actually be priceless, as Totman illustrated by giving an example of a Parisian dating service website that correlated date requests with weather and traffic information to learn if those factors affected how many requests got accepted. The service found a greater rate of accepted requests if the weather was better and people didn't have to deal with traffic headaches on a given day.

Totman's colleague on the panel, Ulku Rowe, managing director of credit risk technology at JP Morgan, shared the importance that firm places on holistic views of data. "We ought to be able to look at interdisciplinary use of that data," she said. "We want risk people who understand origination or traders who really understand the impact of their numbers on the capital, so the firm can make effective use of the data. The biggest value we get out of data management efforts is blending different types of data to make better decisions and better forecasts."

As Totman also said, firms have huge amounts of data, but very little of it is getting used. However, he stated, the importance of unstructured data is catching on, and disparate systems handling different pieces of data are being linked more often.

That's a step in the right direction. Cross-checking or coordinating data from multiple sources yields more potential for financial services businesses than cost-cutting. The increased performance that can result from better-informed insights can carry a firm a lot further than mere reduction of its operational burdens.