Situation
I was brought in to lead a technology team with a mandate to formulate and execute an investment centric technology strategy in an environment where technology was largely geared to break-fix and operations support. Investment reporting was manual, look-through reports took 11 days or more due to the outreach process required for data acquisition and coordination for cross-team consensus. Data lived within teams and tribal knowledge was needed for access.
Solution
Starting from the ground up, we negotiated a common terminology across the teams and created a taxonomy that sparked a data cleansing and migration exercise. Next, we implemented an investment support system for the curation of investment-related data and reports, building automation for data exchange with key sources where possible. Lastly, to maintain discipline and scale, we assembled a data management team to own inbound data integrity, cadence, and distribution.
Impact
Data access, as well as look-through reporting, was reduced to clicks, travelers no longer had to ship reams of documents ahead of their trips. More efficient investment decisions were made with secure reference data access on phones and tablets in addition to traditional devices.
