 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Data Citizens 21, brought to you by Calibra. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Calibra Data Citizens 21. I'm Lisa Martin. I have three guests with me here today, Calibra customer, Freddie Mac. Please welcome Jag, Chief Data Officer and Vice President of Single Family Data and Decisions. Jag, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. Look forward to being here. Excellent. Hi, Tico Ellis here as well. Vice President, Data Transformation and Analytics Solution. Anke, good to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. And Atif Malik, Senior Director from the Single Family Division at Freddie Mac, is here as well. Atif, welcome. Thanks, Lisa. Good to be here. So we have big congratulations in order. Freddie Mac was just announced at Data Citizens as the winners of the Calibra Excellence Award for Data Program of the Year. Congratulations on that. We're going to unpack that, talk about what that means. But I'd love to get familiar with the 3D Jag, start with you. Talk to me a little bit about your background, your current role as Chief Data Officer. I appreciate it, Lisa. Thank you for the opportunity to share our story. My name is Arvin Jaganathan. Anyone just calls me Jag. And as you said, I'm the Single Family Chief Data Officer at Freddie Mac. For those that don't know, Freddie Mac is a government-sponsored entity that supports the U.S. housing finance system. And Single Family deals with the residential side of the marketplace. As CDO, I'm responsible for our managed content, data lineage, data governance, business architecture, which Calibra plays an integral role in that function, as well as support our shared assets across the enterprise and our data modernization efforts, data product execution, decision modeling, as well as our business intelligence capabilities, including AI and ML for various use cases. As a background, starting my career in New York and then moved to Boston in the last 20 years, living in the Northern Virginia DC area, I'm fortunate to have been responsible for business operations, as well as led and executed large transformation efforts. That background has reinforced the power of data and how it's so critical meeting our business objectives. Look forward to our dialogue today, Lisa, once again. Excellent, you have a great background and clearly not a dull moment in your job with Freddie Mac. Ankit, tell me a little bit about your background, your role, what are you doing at Freddie Mac? Definitely. Hi everyone, I'm Ankit Goyal. I'm Vice President of Data Transformation and Analytics Solutions at Freddie Mac. And I work for JAG, I'm responsible for many of the things he said, including leading our transformation to the cloud and migrating all our existing data assets as part of the transformation journey. I'm also responsible for our business information and business data architecture, decision modeling, business intelligence and some of the analytics and artificial intelligence. I started my career back in the day as a computer engineer but I've always been in the financial industry up in New York and now in the Northern Virginia area. I called myself that bridge between business and technology and I would say I think over the last six years with data found that perfect spot where business and technology actually come together to solve real problems and really lead businesses to the next stages. So thank you, Lisa, for the opportunity today. Excellent, and we're going to unpack, you call yourself the bridge between business and IT that's always such an important bridge. We're going to talk about that in just a minute but I want to get your background, tell our audience about you. Sure, hi, I'm Athuk Malik. I'm Senior Director of Business Data Architecture and Data Transformation in Freddie Mac. I'm responsible for the overall business data architecture and transformation of the existing data assets onto the cloud data lake. My team is responsible for the Kalibera platform and the business analysts that are using and maintaining the data in Kalibera and also driving the data architecture and close collaboration with our engineering teams. My background is I'm an engineer at heart. I still do a lot of development. This is my first time as an entrepreneur of crossing over onto the bridge onto the business side of maintaining data and working with data teams. Jack, let's talk about digital transformation. Freddie Mac is a 50-year-old and growing company. I always love talking with established businesses about digital transformation. It's pretty challenging. Talk to me about your initial plan and what some of the main challenges were that you were looking to solve. Great question, Lisa. And it's definitely pertinent, as you say, in our digital world or figuring out how we need to accomplish it. If I look at our data modernization, it is a major program and effort in our division. What started as a reducing cost or looking at an infrastructure play, moving from physical data assets to the cloud, as well as enhancing our resiliency as quickly morphed into meeting business demand and objectives, whether it be for sourcing, servicing, or securization of our loan products. So where are we? As we think about creating this digital data marketplace, we are basically forming and powering a new data ecosystem, which Kaliber is definitely playing a major role in. It's more than just a cloud-native data lake, but it's bringing in some of our current assets and capabilities into this new data landscape. So as we think about creating an information hub, part of the challenge is, as you say, 50 years of having millions of loans and millions of data across multiple assets, it's figuring out that you still have to care and feed legacy while you're building the new highway and figuring out how you best have to transform and translate and move data and assets to this new platform. What we've been striving for is looking at what is the business demand and what is the business use case and what's the value to help prioritize that transformation. The exciting part is, as you think about new uses of acquiring and distribution of data, as well as new use cases for prescriptive and predictive analytics, the power of what we're building in our data, this new data ecosystem, we're feeling comfortable, we'll meet the business demand, but as any CDO will tell you, demand is always outpaces our capacity. And that's why we want to be very diligent in terms of our execution plan. So we're very excited as to what we've accomplished so far this year and looking forward for the remainder of the year and as you go into 2022. Excellent, thanks, Jack. Let's go to you. As I mentioned in the intro of that, Freddie Mac has won the Calibra Excellence Award for Data Program of the Year. Again, congratulations on that. But I'd love to understand the Calibra Center of Excellence that you're building at Freddie Mac. First of all, define what a center of excellence is to Freddie Mac and then what you're specifically building with Calibra. Yeah, sure. So the Calibra Center of Excellence provides us the overall framework from a people and process standpoint to focus in on our use of Calibra and for adopting best practices. We can have teams that are focused just on developing best practices and implementing workflows and lineage within Calibra and implementing and adopting a number of different aspects of Calibra. It provides a central hub of people being domain experts on the tool that can then be leveraged by different groups within the organization to maintain the tool. Another follow-on question, Atif, for you. How does Freddie Mac define a data citizen? Does anybody in finance or sales or marketing or operations, what's that definition of data citizen at Freddie Mac? It's really everyone. It's within the organization. They all consume data in different ways and we provide a way of governing data and for them to get a better understanding of data from Calibra itself. So it's really everyone within the organization in that way. Excellent. Okay, let's go over to you. A big topic at Data Citizens 21 is collaboration. That's probably a word that we used a ton in the last 15 plus months or so is every business really pivoted quickly to figure out how do we best collaborate? But something that you talked about in your intro is being the bridge between business and IT. I want to understand from your perspective how can data teams help to drive improved collaboration between business and IT? Great question, Lisa. Increasing the collaboration between business and technology has been a key focus area for us at Freddie Mac over the last few years. We actually started on an agile transformation journey two years ago that we called modern delivery. And that was about moving away from project teams to persistent product teams that brought business and technology together. And we've really been able to pioneer that in the data space within Freddie Mac where we have now teams with product owners coming from the data team and then full stack IT developers with them creating these combined teams to meet the business needs. We found that bringing these teams together really remove the barriers that were there in the interaction and the employee satisfaction has been high. And like you said over the last 16 months with the pandemic, we've actually seen the productivity stay same or even go up because the teams were all working together. They work as a unit and they all have the sense of ownership versus working on a project that has a finite end date to say. So we've been really lucky with having started this two years ago. Well, and that's great. And congratulations about either maintaining productivity or having it go up during the last 16 months which have been incredibly challenging. Jack, I want to ask you, what does winning this award from Calibra? What does this mean to you and your team? And does this signify that you're really establishing a data-first culture? Great question, Lisa again. I think winning the award just from a team standpoint, it's a great honor. Calibra's been a fantastic partner. And when I think about the journey of going from spreadsheets that all of us had in the past to now having all our business class returns, lineage and really being at the forefront of our data modernization. So as we think about moving to the cloud, Calibra is step in step with us in terms of our integral part of that holistic delivery model. When I ultimately as a CDO, it's really the team's honor and effort because this has been a multi-year journey to get here. And it's great that Calibra as a partner has helped us achieve some of these goals but also recognized where we are in terms of looking at data as a product and some of our leading forefront in using that holistic delivery to meet our business objectives. So overall, truly jazzed when we found that we won data program the year by Calibra. I'm very honored to win this award. That's where we got to bring back. I'm jazzed, I like that. Jack sticking with you, let's unpack a little bit. Some of those positive results, those business outcomes that you've seen so far from the data program. What are those? Yeah, so again, if you were thinking about a traditional CDO model, what were the terms that would have been used a few years ago? It was around governance, it may have been viewed as an oversight, maybe less talking around modernization or what it was the business values that can needed to accomplish. Collectively, it's really those three building blocks. Managing content, you got to trust your source, but ultimately it's empowering the business. So the best success that I could say at Freddie, as you're moving to this digital world, it's really empowering the business to figure out the new capabilities and demand and objectives that we're meeting. We're not going to be able to transform the mortgage industry, we're not going to be able or any industry if we're still stuck in old world thinking. And ultimately data is going to be the blood that has to enable those capabilities. So if you tell me the best success, we're no longer talking a, okay, I got my data governance, what do we have to do? It's all embedded together. And as Ankit alluded to, that partnership between business and IT informing that data is a product where now you're delivering capabilities holistically from program teams all across data, it's no longer an afterthought as I said a few minutes ago. You're able to then meet the demand what's current and how do we want to think about going forward? So it's no longer buzzwords, digital data marketplace, what is the value of that? And that's what the success I think of our group collectively working across the organization. It's just not one team. It's a cross-door organization. And we have our partners, our operations, everyone from business owners, all swimming in the same direction with, and I would say critical management support. So top of the house, our head of business, my boss was the COO, full supportive in terms of how we're trying to execute. And that makes us, it's critical because when there's potential trade-offs, we're all looking at it collectively as an organization. Right, that's the best viewpoint to have is that sort of centralized unified vision. And as you say, Jag, the support from up top. Ateeth, I want to ask you, you established the Kaliber at Center of Excellence. What are you focused on now? So we're really focused in allowing our users to consume data and understand data and really democratizing data so that they can really get a better understanding of that. So that's a lot of our focus and engaging with Kaliber and getting them to start to define things in Kaliber a lot more. That's a lot of our focus right now. Excellent, I want to stay with you one more question. Ateeth and I'm going to ask to all of you, what are you most excited about? A lot of success that you've talked about transforming a legacy institution. What are you most excited about and what are the next steps for the data program? Ateeth, what are your thoughts there? Yeah, so really modernizing onto a cloud data lake and allowing all of the users in Freddie Mac to consume data with the level of governance that we need around it is a really exciting proposition for me. Anke, what would you say is most exciting to you? I'm really looking forward to the opportunities that artificial intelligence has to offer not just in the augmented analytics space but in the overall data management life cycle. There's still a lot of things that are manual in the data management space and I personally believe artificial intelligence is a huge role to play there. And, Jag, same question to you. It seems like you have a really strong collaborative team. You have a very collaborative relationship with management and with Colibra. What are you excited about? Let's come down the pipe. So, Lisa, if I look at it, we sit back here June, 2021, where were we a year ago? And you think about a lot of the capabilities and some of the advancements that we made just in a year sitting virtually using that word jazzed or induced or feeling really great about, we made a lot of accomplishments. I'm excited about what we're going to be doing for the next year. So there's other use cases and I could talk about AIML and Octav talks about our new ecosystem. Seeing those new cases come to fruition so that we are contributing to value from a business standpoint to the organization is what really keeps me up at night, gets me up in the morning and really feeling dues for the entire division. Excellent. Well, I want to thank all three of you for joining me today, talking about the successes that Freddie Macistan had transforming in partnership with Calibra. Again, congratulations on the Calibra Excellence Award for the data program. It's been a pleasure talking to all three of you. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Calibra data citizens, 21.