Meet Rohit Kumar, advisor to the Data Collaboration Alliance

Rohit is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Toronto-based boutique techno-management consulting firm, The Honest Consultants.

Tell us about yourself

I've been in the financial technology space for over a decade, delivering large financial regulatory programs and transformation programs for large financial institutions over the globe.

In my role, I have built technology blueprints, architecture blueprints, working with technologies, building the solution for the business for the next generation of the solution that they needed.

What's your relationship with data?

Data is central and key for everything that I've been working on. No matter what business problem you solve whether it is market risk, credit risk - you name it. The problem you're solving almost always comes down to data.

So data is such an incredible piece of that and for large financial institutions especially, it's a problem because they have legacy systems built out in '70s-'80s which was created for back then when it was built, but no longer can sustain the model innovation and help them to build the next future.

So there's a lot of point-to-point connections in how they are solving these problems and almost always it comes down to data such as how can we get rid of these anomalies that data has.

The issue is within data governance - how can we introduce this practice so that we all are able to go to the future without duplicating the data all the time and just expanding the data warehouses and need for data warehouses for no reason so we can start innovating on actual problem-solving. So data is almost central for everything

Why the Data Collaboration Alliance?

I think Data Collaboration Alliance has a specific role to play in the industry to close out industry standards to improve the controls and to improve how data can be accessed around the world.

I think especially in the financial institution space over the last 12 and 18 months there have been a lot of investment in data lakes. Now data lake is great, its convergence to a defined set of infrastructure capabilities, including ingestions of all data storage and cataloging. It all makes sense but organization-applied data lakes lack as a foundation for the broader data management and digital strategies that are often referred to as data backbone.

Now the Data Collaboration Alliance as an entity, if they are able to set out these standards where you really don't need to use copies so you don't need to do copies anymore, you can actually access whatever data you have been granted so your accessibility of the data to innovate and to go to the next future increases greatly.

I think that is quite remarkable and I think that is something I'm really excited to be a part of.

Your invitation

So I invite everyone to join and get themselves associated with the Data Collaboration Alliance. There's a lot going on in terms of free projects and free learning that they can get associated with. Upskill their knowledge on how they can use the technology for our better data management in the day-to-day use. Especially in the financial services industry where it's going through a lot of upheavals because of the FinTech and whatnot.

It's about time for all the folks, no matter which area of your business you are in data is central to everything that you deliver. It's about time to get your skills up and you know, really honed up and Data Collaboration Alliance is an important place to be that.

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The Data Collaboration Alliance is a nonprofit working to advance data ownership through pilot projects in sustainability, healthcare, education, and social inclusion. We also offer free training in the Data Collaboration methodology. Check out The Data Drop podcast on our website or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.