As a follow up to our December 2, 2009th meeting, we would like to thank Adriaan Bouten, SVP & Chief Information Officer of McGraw-Hill companies, Information and Media, for hosting an absolutely smashing event. In addition, special thanks to our panelists; David Hirschfeld, Managing Director and Head of the Times Series Practice Area within Morgan Stanley, Jeff Hammerbacher, Vice President of Products and Chief Scientist at Cloudera, John A. Bottega, Vice President and Chief Data Officer for the Markets division of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, World wide data expert, Stephen Brobst, and to our moderator; John Trustman, well noted technology and business strategist from Aspen Colorado. The knowledge, experience, and humor you all shared with us, was truly an amazing experience. (Please see all bio’s below). Your outspoken views on both business and technology challenges continue to give us fuel for thought.
Special thanks to all the attendees who despite the rain, and tree lighting traffic, succeeded in joining us at this fully booked event!
Your opinions, thoughts and practical suggestions, really made the evening the success that it was.
Tips from the Experts:
Projects
Need business ownership/sponsorship at a senior-level
- There needs to be a well-defined financial impact to the problem with well defined financial benefits for the business.
- Projects should be fully funded for all phases.
- Don’t ignore simple solutions (i.e. low tech; e.g. keep in mind the “Sorting Return Mail” story)
- Flexible system by design: requirements & specifications will change over time
- Incremental goals; don’t try to “boil the ocean”
- Pay attention to the right exceptions
Data
- Store and keep the most granular, objective data possible
- Date governance/ownership by business
- Data quality needs to start at the source
- Find multiple sources for potentially suspect data, put in checks where appropriate
- Data quality includes reasonableness testing
- Identify a single source of truth
- Remove/reduce the islands of data
- Now that effective large scale data storage can be brought about in a very cost effective manner,we no longer can use cost as a barrier to building large data stores. Keep more data, at the granular level
- Know thy data: track it through the full lifecycle
General
- Don’t pay too much attention to the misleading sound bites
- Improve business process quality through tech ownership
- Compensation is motivational; incentive can include embarrassment
- Strategy must drive and is much more important than technology
- Strategy should include solving the Data/Business Process/and Analytics issues simultaneously.
- Hire and keep good people
Final Observations:
It was clear from the discussions that there is no silver bullet. We all agreed that many of the issues discussed are recurrent year after year. Given the experts on our panel, and the wealth of wisdom in the room, we can rest assured that the tips provided are worth reviewing carefully. Wishing you all much luck in affecting change in your respective organizations. Do let us know if you have any further tips to share with the group.
Wishing you all a very happy and healthy holiday season, and all the best as we head into 2010!
-malka
The following companies are currently registered for the December meeting:
Cloudera, Morgan Stanley, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Alliance Bernstein, Exigen Partners, Eton Park, Touro College, AEGIS, McCann-Erickson Advertising, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Ionic Capital, SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance, Bunge Ltd., XL Capital, Markit, Promontory Financial Group LLC, The Harry Fox Agency, Inc., Beth Abraham Health Services, Barnard University, McGraw-Hill Companies, Folica.com, Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, World Education Services, Maverick Capital, Bank Leumi USA, Investment Technology Group (ITG), ESP Technologies Corp., Pequot Capital Management, Hotel Funds, Angelo, Gordon and Co., MF Global Inc., Standard and Poor’s, Highbridge Capital Management,LLC, Walz Group and Lifetime Network.
We are pleased to announce our esteemed panel and moderator for the December 2nd East Coast CIO Forum:
Jeff Hammerbacher, Vice President of Products and Chief Scientist at Cloudera, David Hirschfeld, Managing Director and Head of the Times Series Practice Area within Morgan Stanley, John A. Bottega, Vice President and Chief Data Officer for the Markets division of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, World wide data expert, Stephen Brobst, and John Trustman, well noted technology and business strategist from Aspen Colorado, as our moderator. (Please see all bio’s below).
We are thrilled to have brought together this extraordinary group of panel members, each known for their outstanding experience as well as outspoken views on many topics. After much discussion at some of our recent East Coast CIO Forum’s, we have asked them to join us and speak to some of our major business and technology challenges, as we prepare for 2010. Lastly, and of most importance, special thanks to Adriaan Bouten, SVP & Chief Information Officer of McGraw-Hill companies, Information and Media, for hosting our event.
Meeting Agenda:
“A Demon of our own Design: Searching for Hay in Haystacks”
Many of the classic problems in data management and analytical processing are well addressed with the range of “usual suspects”: ETL tools, storage containers, fast disks and analytical processing engines. However, the emergence of ubiquitous web access and cheaper storage have conspired against the poor souls who have the never ending task of figuring out how best to store the data and then retrieve useful nuggets that are turned into business decisions. Before we can figure out what solutions are best suited, we at least need to take a step back and figure out why we need to do this.
- What compelling business advantage is likely or has accrued to those who have or will be masters of massive data management initiatives? Will we just wind up with more Friends on Facebook or better Netflix recommendations?
- Is the supply of tools the catalyst for creating the demand? (Who knew we needed to walk around with 10,000 songs until we realized we could?)
- What’s the relationship between the product take-up of smartphones and 3G and the data challenges? If everyone’s got an Iphone, will keeping track of clicks still be our most compelling challenge?
- Is it likely that the Open Source community will be more nimble to adapt to data management needs or will established players be the key providers?
- As technology managers, how can we keep our teams aware of what’s required on the leading edge without sending folks onto science projects?
- What are the New Directions in Financial Data?
The Panel will be organized to focus on the following:
- Business Drivers
- Markets/Trading
- Regulation & Oversight
- Requirements generation & Management
- New Data Sources
- Vendors
- Web/Social media
- Data Management
- Containers
- Platforms
- Talent Management
The following are questions that have already been submitted to the panel. We are accepting additional questions from those registered.
- Agile versus re-use – friends or foe?
- Skill set requirements for a successful analyst.
- What is the “best” programming model for analytics?
- The role of open source versus commercial software models.
- Traditional versus non-traditional data types.
- The role of file systems versus in-database processing.
- What are the most critical data management problems for enterprises?
- Where is the most data getting generated?
- What are the most important trends going on today in data management? How do these vary by industry and/or company size?
- How are large players (both on the vendor and industry sides) incorporating these trends into practice? How are they creating and impacting the trends?
- Is the stored procedure gone forever?
- What progamming models are breaking through the pack as leaders for analytics? And, how has the business intelligence needs of organizations impacted the models?
- How are data management and analysis teams staffed in the enterprise (operations, engineering, analysis, management, etc.)? The data, storage, processing, and techniques are all changing. How can companies (large and small) staff appropriately to keep business moving and also stay on top of these changes?
Registration for the meeting continues via e-mail. For those who would like their chief architects to join them at the meeting, we will be allotting one additional person per company. Due to the huge response, confirmations will be distributed on a first come basis. For those who miss this window you will be placed on a waiting list, pending any cancellations. As always, we will be limiting the number of attendees in order to allow for an interactive evening. Logistics and details will be send to all confirmed registered attendees.
Thanks to all those of you who have contributed in making this panel a reality!
Looking forward to seeing you all in December.
-malka
Malka Treuhaft
Executive Director East Coast CIO Forum &
President
Truision Inc.
646.942.2625 (office)
917.589.1069 (mobile)
718.375.1529 (fax)
www.truision.com
David Hirschfeld Bio
Mr. Hirschfeld is currently a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and Head of the Times Series Practice Area. Previously, he was COO of the Modelware Department, which provided the infrastructure for much of Equity Research and the equity fundamental analytics supporting Banking, Private Equity and Sales. He is now leading a new “practice area” within the Institutional Sales and Trading group managing all Time Series Systems and providing a unified approach across all business units and data domains . Prior to joining Morgan, he was SVP, Operations at Asset Control, a leading vendor of Data Management software. During his more than 25 years in the Financial Markets, he has had a variety of both trading, analytical, operational and technology jobs. These jobs have been at both buy side (Citadel Investment and Tudor Investment) and sell side (Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch) institutions. In his trading capacity, he has worked as a derivatives floor trader, an Index arbitrageur and a “black box” systems trader. He holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from Duke University as well as a Masters Degree in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Jeff Hammerbacher Bio
Jeff Hammerbacher is the Vice President of Products and Chief Scientist at Cloudera. Jeff was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to joining Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. The team produced several academic papers and two open source projects: Hive, a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop, and Cassandra, a structured storage system on a P2P network. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.
Stephen Brobst Bio
Stephen Brobst is the Chief Technology Officer for Teradata Corporation. His expertise is in the identification and development of opportunities for the strategic use of technology in competitive business environments. Over the past twenty years Stephen has been involved in numerous engagements in which he has been called upon to apply his combined expertise in business strategy and high-end parallel systems to develop frameworks for data warehousing and data mining to leverage information for strategic advantage. Clients with whom he has worked include leaders such as Office Depot, Fidelity Investments, General Motors Corporation, Kroger Company, Wells Fargo Bank, Wal*Mart, AT&T Communications, Aetna Health Plans, Metropolitan Life Insurance, VISA International, Vodafone, Blockbuster Entertainment, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Nationwide Insurance, American Airlines, Mayo Clinic, Walgreen Corporation, and many more. Stephen has particular expertise in the deployment of solutions for maximizing the value of customer relationships through use of advanced CRM techniques (including Web deployment).
Stephen has hands-on experience in benchmarking and data warehouse construction with every major SMP, NUMA and MPP architecture available in the industry today. Stephen has served as an advisor to the Transaction Processing Council in regard to design for the TPC benchmarks and was involved in the development of the DataChallange benchmark in cooperation with the Transaction Processing Council. He has also served on the Oracle VLDB Steering Group Committee and the Teradata User Advisory Board. Prior to joining Teradata, Stephen successfully launched three start-up companies related to high-end database products and services in the data warehousing and e-business marketplaces: (1) Tanning Technology Corporation (IPO on NASDAQ), (2) NexTek Solutions (acquired by IBM), and (3) Strategic Technologies & Systems (acquired by NCR).
Previously, Stephen taught graduate courses at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in both the MBA program at the Sloan School of Management and in the Computer Science departments of both universities. He received instructor of the year award for two of his last five years in the MET Computer Science department at Boston University and continues to guest lecture frequently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Stephen performed Masters and PhD research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his dissertation work focused on load-balancing and resource allocation for parallel computing architectures. He also holds an MBA with joint course and thesis work at the Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management. Stephen completed his undergraduate work in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in just three years at U.C. Berkeley, and was awarded with the highest honor given to a graduating senior in the College of Engineering (Bechtel Engineering Award). Stephen is an elected member of the Phi Beta Kappa, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, New York Academy of Sciences, U.C. Berkeley Alumni Scholars Association, and California Scholarship Federation honor societies. He is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, Society for Information Management, and Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility. Stephen also serves as an advisor to the National Academy of Sciences in the area of IT workforce development.
Stephen has authored numerous journal and conference papers in the fields of data management and parallel computing environments and is an internationally recognized speaker (and practitioner) in the area of breakthrough systems implementation. He has co-authored Building a Data Warehouse for Decision Support, published by Prentice Hall PTR. Stephen is currently working on a second book focused on real-time data warehousing. He has been a contributing editor for Intelligent Enterprise Magazine and has published dozens of technical articles in The International Journal of High Speed Computing, Communications of the ACM, The Journal of Data Warehousing, Enterprise Systems Journal, DM Review, Database Programming and Design, DBMS Tools & Techniques, DB2 Magazine, Oracle Magazine, Teradata Review, and many others. Stephen has also served on the RealWare Panel for recognizing outstanding implementations in the field of e-commerce and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Stephen has been on the faculty of the Data Warehousing Institute since 1996 and teaches courses related to Real-Time Data Warehousing and High Performance Data Warehouse Design.
John A. Bottega BIO
John Bottega is Vice President and Chief Data Officer for the Markets division of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. John joined the Bank in February of 2009, responsible for driving and implementing the Data Management strategy. Prior to joining the Bank, John held the position as Chief Data Office for Citi, making him the first person in the finance industry to hold this title. At Citi, he was responsible for planning and managing the Investment Bank’s data management strategy, data policies, operational line functions and data investments.
John has over 28 years of experience managing and transforming reference data functions, having spend 9 of those years at Lehman Brothers from 1990 to 1999 building their data management infrastructure of centralized market data processing and data quality, and 9 years collectively at Merrill Lynch, first as an applications developer, then as Product Manager for their Product & Pricing Data environments. As an active industry participant, John has given over 2 dozen presentations and participated in dozens of round-table discussions on data management best practices at various Data Conferences globally, including a presentation to the State banks of China, an anti-money laundering conference in Singapore, and a presentation on data management organizational structure and strategy to the US Department of Defense.
John is currently the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the EDM Council (Enterprise Data Management Council), an industry association focused on Financial Industry Data Management. He has also has served as the chairman of the executive committee of the Financial Information Services Division of the SIIA, has been a member of the SIA Standards and Protocol Committee, the Market Data Definition Language Committee and has been a member of the ISO Working Group 10 and Working Group 11 industry standards bodies.
John Trustman BIO
Mr. Trustman is an acknowledged pioneer and leader in the design, development and operation of retail to enterprise-scale analytic and interactive applications in numerous industries including healthcare, insurance, financial services and retail. He is the visionary behind numerous breakthrough ideas, innovative new products and holds multiple patents in a number of areas ranging from natural language processing, movement disorder diagnosis and large scale healthcare transaction processing. Mr. Trustman draws upon a unique blend of business, operations and technical skills and over 30 years of experience in variety of senior executive roles including CEO, COO, CIO and CTO of Fortune 50 and other publicly traded and start-up companies, as well as business strategy and technology advisor to government agencies, business and technical consulting companies, technology companies, Fortune 50 and other publicly traded and start-up companies. Mr. Trustman is typically called upon when the problem is unique or very difficult.
Most recently, Mr. Trustman has been involved in a number of broadband, healthcare and software endeavors including the development of a business and implementation plan for a fiber optics deployment including healthcare, education and public service offerings for a rural county in Colorado. He currently serves on the Board of Directors and is a key contributor to the software product capabilities of a start-up company developing a product intended to radically transform the mental assessment process and enable breakthrough neurological and psychiatric brainwave data analytics, and is the product visionary for a National Provider Credentialing application. As the Managing Partner of Salt Island Consulting, Mr. Trustman provided key technology strategy assistance to a Fortune 100 retail company in their global enterprise wide business and technology transformation and SAP implementation. Additionally, he led a number of other significant efforts across multiple industries, including the XML standards introduction in the Property and Casualty insurance industry.
Mr. Trustman was the co-founder of and the visionary behind deNovis— the breakthrough healthcare administrative software which was selected by Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) for their operational systems— and he and his team have worked closely with various members of the US Senate to achieve breakthrough innovations and efficiency in the U.S. Healthcare market. Mr. Trustman is the former senior vice president and chief information officer of Aetna Health Plans, at the time, the largest commercial health insurer in the United States. He was a senior vice president of Fidelity Investments where he developed the first online trading applications in the U.S. and Europe, pioneered the use of data warehousing for customer relationship management, and led the firm‘s efforts in internal trading and customer service applications in the U.S. and internationally. Mr. Trustman began his career at United States Trust Company of Boston, MA, where he was senior vice president & chief information officer, and at Bain & Company, an international management-consulting firm, where he was a manager in the firm‘s strategy practice. A writer, lecturer and independent strategy and technology consultant, Mr. Trustman holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar, and a BA from Yale University.
