The A-Team put on another good event at DMS New York yesterday. Lots of good stuff talked and here are a few takeaways that I remember:

• Data Utilities – One of presenters said that “Data Utility” was a really overused term second only to “Big Data”. My comment would be that a lot of the managed services folks seem to want to talk about “Data Utilities” – seeming to prefer that term rather than what they are? Maybe because they perceive as better marketing and/or maybe because they hope to be annointed/appointed (how I don’t know) as an industry “Data Utility”. Anyway for me they fail to address the issue of client-specific data and its management very well, much to the detriment of their argument imho – although SmartStream did say that client data can be mixed up into the data services they offer.
• Andrew Gets Literaturally Physical – Andrew Delaney of the A-Team expressed a preference for “physical” books when talking about why the A-Team also prints the Regulatory Data Handbook2 as well as making it available online. I have to agree that holding a book still beats my Kindle experience but maybe I am just getting old. Andrew should check out this YouTube video on how the book was first introduced…
• FIBO – The Financial Instrument Business Ontology (FIBO) was discussed in the context of trying to establish industry standards for data. As ever the usage of words like “Ontology” I suspect leaves a lot of business folks looking for the nearest double shot of expresso but that aside, seems like the EDM Council are making some progress on developing this standard. Main point from the event was industry adoption is key. I found some of the comments during the day a bit schizophrenic, in that some said that the regulators should not mandate standards (i.e. leave it to industry adoption and principles) but then in the next breath discussing the benefits (or otherwise) of the LEI (ok, not mandated but specific and coming from the regulators). Certainly the industry needs “help” (is that a strong enough word?) to get standards in place.
• Data Quality – Lots on data quality with assessing the business value of data quality initiatives being a key point. On the same subject, Predrag of element-22 announced that the EDM Council will soon be announcing adoption of the Data Quality Index, which could be used to correlate data quality with operational KPIs for the business.
• Regulation (doh!) – It wouldn’t be a data management event without lots of discussion on regulation – a key point being that even those regulations that are not directly/explicitly about data still imply that data management is key (take CVA calcs for example) – and on a related note it was suggested that BCBS239 should be considered as a more general data managment template for any business objective.
• Entity Hierarchies/LEI – Ludwig D’Angelo of JPMorgan gave a great talk and said that vendors were missing a massive opportunity in delivering good hierarchy datasets to clients, and that the effort expended on this at firms was enormous. Ludwig said that the lack of hierarchies in the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) is a gap that the private sector could and should fill.  Ludwig also seemed initially to be thrown when one of the audience suggested that they were multiple “golden copies” of hierarchies needed, since definitions of ownership can differ depending on which department you are in (old battle of risk and finance departments again). Good discussion later of how regulation was driving all systems to be much more entity-centric rather than portfolio-centric, emphasising the importance of getting entity hierarchies right.
• DCAM – John Bottega did a great presentation on the Data Management Capability Model (DCAM). John asked Predrag of element-22 to speak about DCAM and he said that unlike previous models (DMM) then this framework would not only assess where you are in data management but will also show you where you need to go. DCAM covers data management strategy / operations / quality / business case / data architecture / tech architecture / governance / program. From what I could see it looked like a great framework – it appeared like common sense and obvious but that is in itself difficult to achieve so good effort I think. Element-22 will offer an online service around DCAM that will also allow anonymous benchmarking of data management capabilities as more institutions get involved (update: the service is called pellustro).
• BCBS239 – Big thanks to John M. Fleming of BNY Mellon and Srikant Ganesan of Risk Focus for taking part in the panel with me. Less focus on spreadsheet use and abuse on this panel unlike the London Panel from last month. John had some very practical ideas such as the use of Wikis to publish/gather data dictionary information and with a large legacy infrastructure you are better documenting differences in definitions across systems rather than trying to change the world from day one. Echoing some of the points from DMS London, it was thought that making the use of internal data standards as part of a project sign off was very pragmatic data governance, but that also some systems should be marked/assessed as obsolete/declining and hence blocked from any additional usage in new project work. Bit of a plug for some of our recent work on data validation and exception management, but the panel said that BCBS239 needs to encompass audit/lineage on calculations/derived data/rules in addition to just the raw data

You can get more on the day by taking a look at my feed via @TheLongSentance and involving others at #DMSNYC.