 From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillan, the Chief Data Officer. We talk a lot about the Chief Data Officer. Over 300 of the Fortune 500 companies now have one, but it's an amorphous term still. The roles and responsibilities of the CDO seem to vary widely by the type of industry, the type of company, the type of person in the organization. So what is a CDO? Who is a CDO and what are the responsibilities of that person? Well, we have a CDO right here today on theCUBE. Pleased to welcome Ursula Katon, the Chief Data Officer of Citizens Bank. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. And with Ursula also is Randy Bean. He's the CEO of New Vantage Partners. Now in the sixth year of their big data executive survey, and some very interesting findings from this survey. And so today we're going to talk about what the CDO role is all about. And perhaps is this the successor to the CIO at some point? Is it some separate function? All questions, I'm sure Ursula has some perspective on. Why don't you start off by telling us about your background and how you came to be a Chief Data Officer? Sure, so I've been in the role since 2012 and I came into the role via the business. So I've held just about every job in a bank you can have. I worked in the branches, I've been on the middle market lending team, investment banking, led large scale technical projects from a business perspective, all of which sort of was a good feeder into this role of how do you use data for the bank? I think two things are important. One is you do not have primarily technical background. That's correct. And two is you have a very broad base background throughout the bank working all these operations. Why is that important if it's important? It's important I think because of the importance of data across the bank, right? So the bank is not just a single area, understanding how data is needed for operating the retail branches, how data is used in our commercial banking businesses, how it's used from operations. All of those components are really important to understanding the role of data in the organization. Now, when you were appointed to this role, what was your reaction? So I've been appointed to lots of roles in my career and I thought, all right, well, we'll see how this goes. I was, I'll say cautiously optimistic about the role. It seemed like a good fit for all the experience that I had leading up to it and a pain point that we were having from within the bank. So it seemed like a good place for me to go. I like solving problems as well, but I have absolutely loved the role. It is a great fit for me actually. Well, talk about the pain points. What kinds of problems was this role created to address? So at both my former bank and this where I am now, the biggest challenge has been integrated data. So the access to data is a challenge normally because what ends up happening within a bank is the silos get created around the type of data. So is it checking data? Is it loan data? Really bringing those together from a customer point of view and thinking about it from a customer experience was always a challenge. And so helping to solve that problem has been fun. Randy, you've just heard about Ursula's background and her responsibilities. Is this typical of what you see as you talk to CDOs across the Fortune 500? It is. Data is one of the most critical corporate assets. And for many years, financial services, institutions, banks, companies in general have had a challenge getting an enterprise view of their data assets. And financial services companies in particular, according to your survey, are among the leaders in really putting data to strategic use. What are some of the ways in which you see them doing that? Well, financial services from the leaders, because first of all, they have lots of data and so they need to invest heavily in their data. And this can range from consumer facing applications to also financial and regulatory management issues as well. Talk about some of the highlights of your survey. This is the sixth year you've done this survey around this year. Really some, I thought, surprisingly strong results in terms of satisfaction levels with the big data projects that the companies are performing. Yeah, the purpose of the survey this year was to focus on results. In the past year, we focused on investments. But we really want to understand whether banks and financial services firms were getting a return on their investment. And what we found out was that nearly half of financial services executives reported that they had measurable returns from their big data initiatives and nearly over 80% reported that their initiatives were successful. So that was one particular finding. In terms of the chief data officer role, there's I think it was about 56% of organizations reported that they now had a chief data officer. And one of the interesting findings would nearly half of the organization suggested that they'd like to see the chief data officer start to take a more innovative role or a more offensive role in terms of introducing innovation and driving innovation within the organization, moving beyond some of the traditional defensive, compliance-oriented activities. Ursula, how much of an issue is that for you? And you talked about silos. And one of the big problems with breaking down silos is there's a lot of cultural commitment to maintaining silos. How have you addressed that problem of getting people to give up their ownership? Yeah, so for me, it's about understanding the culture and getting into the company to start to learn what are the pain points that people are dealing with. Helping people with pain is a great way to break down those silos from a cultural perspective. The data silos you think are actually pretty easy to do. It's the cultural piece that is much more challenging. And so getting to know the pain points, the business, how it operates, what's most important, what are the types of innovation that people are trying to drive, what do we really want to accomplish from helping our customers? And so understanding that really makes the data strategy much easier to execute. Did you find the employees that you were dealing with, as you knew in this role, were generally receptive to what you were trying to do, or was there a cell job involved? It's been a mix, right? I'll say heavier on the excited to have us here to help. But again, cautiously optimistic. There's been lots of initiatives, as you can imagine, through a bank's history that people have said, I'm gonna solve everything for you and they didn't get any of that return. So it's a, all right, we're gonna wait and see. We're excited to have somebody to take on this challenge for us to help us fix these pain points. But they're kind of waiting a little bit. That's probably one of our biggest challenges on an ongoing basis is that employees wanna wait and see. And the reality is in order to make this change, we need them to participate in the change. Not just wait and see. Absolutely, good point. So talk about, well, so you need to focus. So talk about one or two projects that you have made a priority, maybe have achieved some successes now that are proving the value of what you're doing. Yeah, so we have a couple different projects. One on our consumer side that is focused on our marketing analytics. So how our marketing works, focused on the customer experience, making sure that we're giving them the opportunity for the right set of products for each customer. So that analytics project is a really big win for us. And then on the commercial side, same thing. So grouping customers together to get a more holistic picture of the customers from those commercial relationships. They're the product sets that they have with us, how we're interacting with them in order to make that experience better for them as well. Randy, when you look at financial services companies, is Ursula's experience characteristic of what they're trying to do? Develop more of a 360 degree view of the customer, merge different data sets together to create a better profile of what customers need. Is that really where the competitive landscape is shifting? Absolutely, I think we get the benefit of seeing what a range of organizations are doing. And one of the things that's always interesting is when we talk to different organizations, everybody says we face these unique set of challenges, but when we talk to a range of organizations, we find that these challenges are very common across organizations. One of the points that Ursula made that I'd like to underscore is the importance of the cultural challenges. We found that to be the case consistently. Having been in this business for many years, we always assumed that technology would be the barrier, but it's really issues around organizational alignment, change management, business process change, middle management resistance. Those are the things that we hear back from the executives that we speak with. Those are the biggest obstacles that they face. Ursula, tell us about your organization. You have a technical team, but it's not primarily a technical role, as I understand. That is correct. So we have a shared services model. So the technical team actually doesn't even report to me. They are there to provide the technical support for the data environment that we've been building out and really helping us implement the strategy from a technology perspective. But my team is much more focused on governance and stewardship, data quality, our metadata, so the definitions, the business definitions of the data, not even the technical definitions. Really making it so that access to data is much easier for our folks internally in order for them to do their jobs much more easily and help the customers, as well as the technical side is really an implementer portion of this. I often have said that the two biggest challenges I face is that data is not a project and it's easy for companies to say, data is this project that we're doing, but data is a way of life for us. And so how do we make sure that it's not just about a project and it's also not technology. So the leaving data decisions to a technology team is not the right answer, right? The business has to be strongly engaged in that and that's part of the role that my team plays is to help get that engagement from the business to make sure they understand how important their voice is in making decisions about data as well. And that sort of naturally leads into my next question of there's been a lot of talk about the role of the CDO versus the CIO. Is your role something that should in fact be in the office of the CIO? How do you relate organizationally and even on a person to person level with a person at the top of the IT organization? Yeah, so I report to the chief operating officer of the bank as does the CIO, so we are peers. And it works great actually in that method. The CIO, having the CDO report to the CIO, the role wherever it reports takes on that tenor of that organization, right? So if it reports into risk, the primary focus is often risk and compliance. If it sits in the business area, it takes on a much more heavy marketing lens to it. So sitting in the chief operating officer location is actually perfect because it spans the organization, it's an enterprise role. I'm peers with both our CISO and our CIO. We sit together in staff meetings. It's a really fantastic way for us to partner on what needs to get done for the organization. Randy, you've done a lot of research into that very question. What are you finding are some of the best practices organizationally for how organizations are adopting the CDO? Well, that was one of the questions in the survey where the chief data officers should report and it supports what Ursula just said. 35% actually said it should report to the CEO. So maybe that was ambition. Another 18% said the role should report to the chief operating officer. A smaller percentage said it should report to the CIO, 15%. And then various other roles, about 8% to risk and compliance. 7% to the CFO and 3% to the chief marketing officer. So there seems to be a consensus that reporting to a higher level in the organization that is a purview over many domains is really the best fit for the chief data officer role. As this role, of course, this is a very new role still evolving, taking on different forms in different organizations. When you go out to conferences and you meet with other CDOs, what are some of the things you all want to talk about? So it's a little bit of a therapy session for us. We're all dealing with very similar challenges in our organization. And so we usually spend time talking about what are the current challenges. When you come into a role like this, it evolves over time. It's definitely a marathon, not a sprint. So the role starts to evolve. As you first get in and setting up the strategy, making sure it fits into the culture, then begins to evolve with where are the pain points? What are you trying to break through? Where are the cultural barriers as well as technical barriers? The other piece we do spend time talking about, believe it or not, is technology. So the technology is constantly changing and evolving quite quickly. So is there a better, faster, cheaper way for us to get it done than the path that we're already on? So we do spend time talking about that as well. Randy, you have been studying this for a long time. Again, are you beginning to see some consensus developed for how the CDO role should be structured and how it should be positioned vis-a-vis other technology roles? Yeah, in the survey, we asked two questions. What is the current role of the chief data officer and what should be the future role of the chief data officer? And interestingly, in terms of the current role, 56%, the majority cited it as primarily a defensive role in terms of ensuring regulatory compliance. And 44% spoke of it as an offensive role more focused on innovation and driving revenue. But in terms of the role of the chief data officer going forward, 48% suggested it should be to drive innovation and create a data culture. So there's really a push towards being able to create new products and services, new avenues for services deliveries, being able to monetize the data assets of an organization. Many financial services firms have realized initial financial results from decreasing expenses. But that's kind of the low-hanging fruit. And the future is what new product and services capabilities can you bring to bear as a company to innovate and even disrupt markets potentially? And in this study, I believe you found that the cost savings was the primary driver of current big data projects. But you see that changing over time is moving toward more of an innovation agenda. Is that correct? Yeah. We have a lot of statistics that point to the number of initiatives that have been started around accelerating the speed of delivering new capabilities, creating new products and services, monetizing, transforming the business. Many organizations have undertaken those initiatives that they're at their earliest stages. Probably the initiative that's run into the biggest challenge is creating a true data culture. Sometimes they go into organizations and the chief data officer or other executive say, so what do we need to do to create a data culture as if it was something that you could just kind of wave a magic wand and have it happen magically. But we found that that's really a long-term process and it has to be inculcated throughout every level of the organization over time. I want to talk to you, Ursula, about a specific issue that I know retail banks face and you're about 60% of your business is retail. I am a customer of Citizens Bank, just coincidentally. But one of the issues that retail banks face is that the electronic banking and mobile banking has really taken the branch out of the equation for many customers and that brand identity that they had with the people in the branch and the branch itself is under threat. What are you doing? What are you trying to do with data to address that? Yeah, so the data really can change the customer experience. So whether it's how we deliver it via mobile, the web, but even how our people in the branch, our colleagues in the branch can interact with customers, that data can be very informative for them to help from that customer experience perspective. So better understanding the holistic picture of the customer and making sure that we can match products and services to their actual needs is a big piece of the data component of this. As we think into the future, right? Simplification of the online, mobile processes, offering of products and services to them in whatever channel they're touching us on. Those are all things that come from a data underpinning. The only way to do that is with that integrated data. What I make this real for is when you look at a vision of the customer experience that eventually, you hope customers will have, what does that look like? I go into the branch and how is that experience going to be different from what I've had in the past? It really depends on what you're coming in for, right? So if you're coming in to do a transaction, it's probably not going to look or feel that dramatically different than when you were trying to come into deposit a check or take out money than you were in the past. Opening account process could be much more streamlined with a more integrated data so that when you're opening it, you're not answering the same questions multiple times. It could streamline it from that standpoint. If you're coming in with a service issue, so let's say you have some problem on your checking account or potential fraud on your credit card, right? Your interaction with our bank, whether it's through the contact center, the branch, online, you want to have the exact same experience in all three places. And so data helps us be able to do that so that you're not actually getting a different experience depending on the channel you're hitting. Randy, do you see this as being a priority for other companies in the financial services area? Do they really have to revolutionize that customer experience? About half of the executives in the survey felt that if they didn't innovate, their business was going to be at risk over the next decade. So we see a lot of innovation and that takes the form of big data labs, centers of excellence, analytical sandboxes. All of these are environments where you can bring data, you can analyze it quickly and you can basically moderate some of the capabilities that you have. We mentioned before this session began about how Capital One has started to create the coffee houses as One Avenue to change and modify the customer interaction experience a little bit. So there's a lot of that and we see a growing use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital capabilities, as mentioned, cloud computing, blockchain, entering financial services as ways to improve the customer experience. You mentioned blockchain and we're about at our time so I'll give you the last word here. Is your industry ripe for disruption? Do we see some technologies or are there competitors, perhaps crowdsource competitors on the horizon who potentially could disrupt your business and what is your role, if so, what is your role in protecting against that? What's interesting is, no matter the types of disruptors that are out there, they lack the customers and we still have the customers. So even though we may not have the technology, we do have the customers. So we have found that partnering with those disruptive technologies is actually a better way to go for us. So we don't have to invent the technology, somebody else has done that but the partnership with them to enhance our customer experience is fantastic because they don't have the customers and we don't have the technology and we're not a technology company, right, or a bank. What do you think, Randy, good strategy? Well, one final thought on that is, as I mentioned, 50% of the executives said that they were at fear of disruption and when my colleague, Tom Davenport, read that number, he said, wow, it's only half, they should all be frightened and I read it and I said, I was amazed that it was half because financial services companies are essentially conservative institutions and so I was surprised that half of executives were saying that they actually feared that they needed to adopt innovative capabilities in order to continue to compete over the next decade. Well, we are at our time. I wanna thank Ursula and Randy for being here. Ursula, true pleasure to talk to someone who's on the front lines as you are. I have to say, when you arrived in our studios today, you were swarmed by our staff. They were so thrilled to meet someone in your role. Thanks. And you certainly have the personality to bring together groups from around the organization. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Paul Gellin, this is theCUBE.