Some early Cloud Nirvana notes

I have a couple keynote addresses to make in September. I believe Cloud Nirvana is first. The topic, Your Data Is Ready. Is Your AI?, can be interpreted broadly, but I always find that honing-in is a good exercise. At this moment, I’m thinking of looking at it from the perspective of my agency journey.

I’ve been in charge of the agency data function since the early days of “big data.” It’s been a long ride with a lot of twists and turns. The biggest gains happened in the cloud migration without a doubt. But the biggest amount of work is data governance.

The thing that CDOs don’t like to talk about is that we all actually hate data governance. As a field, it’s not at-all unpleasant. But the issue is that data analytics has a 10 year headstart on the governance, and the AI piece has accelerated the rate in which governance is behind.

Yet sometimes governance feels like the Faustian bargain that formalized the CDO position. Meaning, in order to create the right mandate for a data office, the entire lifecycle of data management needed to fall under it.

This is probably more of a proper topic for a roundtable, but I can’t help but think that the twelve or thirteen (or whatever DAMA DMBOK v3 has) wedges are more like spokes with a central hub of data analytics, ML, and AI in the center.

Wrapping your arms around how you strengthen the spokes so that the hub doesn’t collapse is the crucial piece of having AI ready. In older days, even three years ago, you didn’t need the strongest spokes but, with the sheer velocity of modern data operations, you need to do some serious fortifying.

I guess this all wraps into the philosophy of rational techno-optimism...