Data Management Skills

Julia Sutton Interview: Data Management Skills for Professionals

Julia Sutton joined Deutsche Bank where she’s been asked to help build a unique identification database and to integrate it throughout the systems within Deutsche that hold core customer data.

Julia discusses the required data management skills for professionals and how the discipline has changed through out the years.

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Transcript:

Interviewer: Julia, tell us all about your new job. You’ve recently left the Royal Bank of Canada and joined Deutsche Bank. Tell us all about your new job please.

Julia Sutton: I joined Deutsche Bank to work with Wendy Brierley again, who I used to work with at Barclays Capital. She’s asked me to help build a unique identification database and to integrate it throughout the systems within Deutsche that hold core customer data and to make sure that we migrate off of old legacy systems effectively.

Interviewer: This is for Deutsche Bank globally?

Julia Sutton: Yes for the investment banking side.

Interviewer: Right, you joined the LEI panel this morning with various panellists and speakers. What are you taking back from it? Do you feel progress is being made? Are we within walking distance towards the LEIs or is it still in the near future?

Julia Sutton: I think there’s been such a lot of movement on this and very, very quickly. I think it’s being driven quite rapidly now. Francis Gross was very clear in that the European community is now behind it. Not just people who understand data level. But it’s being pushed up so that people who make decisions and who make laws are now aware of what needs to happen. So I’m very confident that we’re going to see it, even if it’s in its only first iteration, by next year. I think we’ll see something start moving.

Interviewer: The other panel you’re joining is all about the data management profession, the skills sets and how it’s changed. Tell us how has it changed? How’s it changed in your organisation, in your life, in your career? What sort of colleagues did you have? What sort of colleagues do you have?

Julia Sutton: When I first got involved in data which was a long, long time ago, about 28 years ago, data was very much seen as being in the departure lounge. You know someone – “We don’t know what to do with you but we’ll put you over there because data doesn’t really matter that much.”

We’ve become something that is vital to the organisation now and that’s happened I think more in the last 15 years. We’ve seen a big difference. It’s now become interesting to others rather than just people who are within the industry who are involved in it. If you take FIMA for example, this would never have happened 20 years ago.

Interviewer: It hasn’t started 10 years ago.

Julia Sutton: Exactly.

Interviewer: Right how has your board of directors, in your previous job or in this job, how has their relationship with data management changed? Are they taking you more seriously? Are they more involved? Are they less involved?

Julia Sutton: I’d obviously have to go back to previous jobs for this because I haven’t been at Deutsche long enough to answer that question. But at RBC they took it very seriously. They went from being quite a small bank to being one of the top tier banks very quickly. They didn’t have any data management or data governance at all. So they went out to the market and looked for people with experience and were very supportive and made sure that the programme that we put in place was supported and that we got what we needed to make sure that we could deliver.

I think that’s true in a lot of organisations now. We don’t have to beg... If you look at the first FIMA, 10 years ago and I was there. It was all about how do we get a business model? How do we build a business case to get what we need for people to take data seriously? You don’t have that conversation anymore. I think the industry as a whole now knows that data needs to be seen as an asset. We’re all at different levels of maturity on that journey but it’s happening.

Interviewer: Okay, imagine the LEI problem was solved and we all suddenly had LEIs and you had a magic wand. You could do one thing to change the way the data world runs what would you do?

Julia Sutton: I would take the management of data out of being predominantly in operations, sometimes in risk and it would become its own master. We need to have chief data officers who have teeth and that have sway over their own budgets and how the operation runs with data.

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