What it Takes to be ‘Data Driven’

Findings from TSAM New York’s Panel: How to Achieve the Status of Being a ‘Data-Driven’ Organization

At last month’s TSAM New York conference, Indus Valley Partners’ CEO Gurvinder Singh participated in a panel, amongst several other industry experts, to discuss what it truly means to be a ‘data-driven’ organization.

Historically, the asset management industry has always been classified as data driven as it is backed by an extensive technology infrastructure built to collate, catalog, process and generate insight from numeric datasets. Moreover, as the industry faces continuous cost pressures a popular response has been to hyper-outsource large parts of the value chain, making it common to see a typical fund manager employ upwards of five external large service providers. This has grown to include the internal generation of data layers within funds, ultimately allowing for continuous operation while still reaping the many benefits of outsourcing.

Within this evolution, there has been a massive shift across the industry landscape from analog processes to digital that has led to an explosion in the quantum of data. With the inclusion of both big and alternative data, firm-wide aggregation and generation of datasets are becoming more complicated. These shifts and advancements in variety, velocity and quantum of data are noticeably overwhelming the majority of early adopters.

While asset management firms had the advantage of processing and reporting largely numeric datasets in the past, the problem statement has shifted with the arrival of non-numeric datasets. To combat, today’s data layers need to be flexible, open and scalable. Additionally, they must provide alternative data processing, cataloging, discovery and subscription capabilities in tandem with flexible and smart data governance.

At this year’s TSAM New York conference, panel participants identified key success factors to becoming a data-driven organization such as:

• Sponsorship from Senior Management enabling a push through organizational shift that is supported by a funded change management program to ensure seamless execution
• Defining Success Upfront in terms of new organizational capabilities, FTE reduction, system decommissioning and internal tracking/socializing
• Leveraging “Macro” Trends such as data science, processing of alternative datasets, self-servicing data layers to reduce costs, regulatory regime change or permanent change in operating economics to define the business imperative

“As we cross over into 2018 and beyond, it’s becoming increasingly important for organizations to take stock of their current data management infrastructure to discover whether it is capable of enabling the creation of a next-generation data layer,” said Gurvinder Singh, CEO of Indus Valley Partners. “This will ultimately help to better process, catalog, govern, publish and socialize both regular and alternative datasets firm-wide in an easy-to-use, self-serviceable manner with minimal IT involvement.”

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