EDM Council 2.0: Trade Body Unveils New Program and Platform

Bottega says the trade association’s evolution, much like that of the financial services industry, is a result of, and has occurred parallel with, the response to the financial crisis a decade ago.

When he joined the EDM Council roughly seven years ago as a member of a bank, Bottega says the CDO role was relatively new to the financial industry, with CDOs talking through the council about how to build a good data management program. That resulted in the EDM Council’s data management capability assessment model (DCAM), which provided a data management framework that includes business case, strategy, funding, program, architecture technology, data quality and data governance.

“The DCAM model identified the ‘what?’ of data management. What it didn’t address was the ‘how?’” Bottega says. That need became the EDM Council’s Best Practices Program, which he describes as a “broad stroke” that provides best practice recommendations on the implementation of data management.

“Now what we’re doing as a continuance of our Best Practices Program is a deep dive on these different topics: data quality, data governance, and even more granular, picking these very topical issues like response to GDPR and the identification of critical data elements (CDEs). These have spawned from that effort and that’s really fleshing out our program,” Bottega says. “Lots of topics, lots of opinions in the industry, and the council is trying to rally those people together, and trying to summarize and take a position in each one of those critical capabilities and present that as the best practice,” he says, adding that the result may be a guideline, a workbook, a white paper, or some other format.

Bottega says the financial industry may not agree with all of the EDM Council’s recommendations, but its goal is to create the “North Star” of best practice, with the understanding that firms may adopt the recommendations at different levels. He says the association believes the program is enough to move the industry forward, adding that it has already received support from banks, consulting firms and regulators.

“If [we] can get the banks and the regulators to say this is how to do it, that’ll move the market. The council has been very pleased with the Best Practices Program and now we want to continue to evolve the program going forward,” he says.

‘Next Generation’

That evolution represents a change in the council’s strategy that Bottega says is a “significant shift” in its approach to how it serves its members.

“With advances in technology and data management practices, the challenges with regulation, it behoves us not to be the owner of that content, but to be the purveyor of or broker for that content,” he says. “There are a lot of smart people out there doing a lot of good things, so it’s not that we’re abandoning our opinions, because we as a trade association should take a position on things, but we also want to engage our members and bring their knowledge to bear.”

Bottega says the result is a new EDM Council website, which includes a social media-based platform and will be launched by the start of the second quarter this year. “It is an enclosed network for the membership so they can share their ideas between members,” he says, adding that with more than 8,000 members, it was the best way for the association to communicate effectively.

The new platform will allow the association to reach outside of finance, and to create communities for data professionals in healthcare, manufacturing, and other industries, which would both increase EDM Council membership and allow the members to learn more from each other.

“This is the next generation of knowledge management. The council’s membership expansion happened because of crisis and regulation, and now they’re facing new challenges,” Bottega says, adding that the industry was previously defensive, responding to regulation and compliance, but that has now changed and the focus is on data insights and understanding how the market moves, so members can create innovative products and services.