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Allen Chaves
Name: Allen Chaves
Title: Director of Data Governance and Research Analytics, Arbella Insurance
Age: 37
Experience: 15 years
Allen Chaves began his career in the insurance industry on a Monday morning, after collecting his diploma the previous Friday evening. His first role blended traditional underwriting and working with data to create business intelligence reports, and that ultimately launched him into his newly created role at Arbella Insurance. Chaves sat down with Banker & Tradesman recently to talk about data – despite having mostly lost his voice cheering for the Patriots the night before.
Q: Can you tell our readers about this new role and your top priorities in the position?
A: First and foremost, data governance is something that is kind of known about but not necessarily prevalent everywhere. The most important piece of that is driving the data strategy and ownership across the organization, enterprise-wide, and representing the organization. That’s a big component of that and there’s a lot that comes with that.
Secondly, with that, you have all your data in house and then there’s the data you can get outside your four walls. So I do work with a lot of third-party vendors on acquiring data to add to our business processes or analytics.
When I say representing the business and enterprise-wide from a data standpoint, it’s really doing everything that entails to drive towards having clearer, consistent, quality data, and that’s important. A lot of organizations are probably not happy with the data that they have. Data governance is putting into action and doing something about that. Enterprise-wide, everyone needs data, everyone relies on data to manage their business. So if you don’t have a singular focus driving toward that clear, consistent clean data, you can make the wrong assumptions and lead down the wrong path.
Q: What does data quality mean for you?
A: Data quality does mean a lot of different things, but at the end of the day something that I think is really applicable to banking, financial services, insurance or really any company, is that your data’s always coming from somewhere. A lot of times, it’s coming from some type of system. That data, as it flows downstream, can take on different meanings. Sometimes you have multiple pieces of data that all look like the same thing and there might be some inconsistency around the organization as to what’s actually being used.
There’s one important piece around data quality, which is really just, what are you looking at? And is it clean? Then the second piece is around what we do with that data: metrics, important pieces that everyone uses, need to be consistent. You need to apply those metrics consistently across the organization so you don’t have one department looking at the business one way and another department looking at the business another way. That can often lead to different conclusions.
Q: So how do you know if your data is clean?
A: You can profile it. You can profile the data. There’s a lot of tools out there. You can do it just using Excel, too, if you’re not investing in some of the big data tools. And it’s important to look at the percent populated, the percent unique, and understand the lineage of the data. That’s probably the biggest piece. The data always comes from somewhere. Does it come from user input? Does it flow from another area? I think oftentimes when you’re prioritizing, you’re going right to the end. You’re pulling the data out and you’re trying to glean value out of it, but without having that end to end understanding of the data, you can kind of miss the forest for the trees.
Q: How does security factor into all of this?
A: Data governance has a significant role to play in security, in owning that, everything from field level security to protect against if that data was ever hacked, what are they going to get? There’s a lot of methods, and especially when you invest in more tools, to obfuscate that data. That’s another important piece of my new role, which quite honestly is very new to me, because that was traditionally managed out of our IT security team and that’s another area where business leaders have to take ownership of that as well. That’s obviously more of a collaboration between your technology team and the rest of the business. When I mention wrapping your arms around the data, that’s a big piece of it.
Chaves’ Top Five Patriots’ Super Bowl Wins:
- LI
- XXXVI
- XLIX
- XXXVIII
- XXXIX
