Data Management & Governance Specialist | Privacy Officer | Best-Selling Author
Tejasvi Addagada is a data strategist, engineer, and data protection officer with 15 years of success, assisting enterprises to develop, modernize, and optimize digital and native capabilities to realize 100% benefits.
Tejasvi Addagada is a data practitioner and consultant assisting fortune 500 firms. He helps to build and optimize data management and governance solutions. Tejasvi provides a wide range of services including data strategy, risk management, app service rationalization, digital transformation, and process excellence. He also currently heads the data management and governance operations of a major financial institution.
Tejasvi’s expertise comes from many areas of work, including consumer banking, commercial banking, capital markets and health care. As a process and domain consultant, Tejasvi leverages his expertise along with data, people, process, and technology capabilities to transform major consumer services.
He is an early data provocateur in the industry, connecting with many thought leaders, in standardizing multiple different data practices. His write ups address common challenges and opportunities that organizations need to embrace in carving their way forward.
Tejasvi published his latest book, Data Management and Governance Services: Simple and Effective Approaches, in 2017.
What attracted you to data management or IT, and why did you choose to pursue this career?
I was into software engineering and then transitioned into a business analyst while working with Fortune 100 clients. Then, I found a need for the active management of data. I specialize in data governance and designed an operating model for a tier-1 chief data officer. From then, I took an interest in governing data and designed transformative programs for organizations to manage and govern data.
What has been your greatest career accomplishment so far, and why has it been important to your career?
As most organizations started formalizing their data offices in 2009, establishing data governance functions became a new normal. I also had the opportunity to formalize data operations by setting up global functions. The interesting part is that I got to set up a data risk office in the second line of defense to bolster the controls put through the data governance function. This was with a mortgage lender undergoing regulatory oversight and establishing a data risk office has greatly reduced the regulatory risk associated with using bad data.
What are the two or three biggest challenges you face as a data management professional / CDO and how can we address them?
One of the first challenges in most organizations with multiple data consumers is enabling ownership of data. Constant communication, awareness, and institutionalizing governance through tools has assisted to drive ownership of data with process owners.
Data quality often starts with a programmatic approach; however, the organization doesn’t address the problem completely. This becomes a yearly activity with lack of sustainable outcomes. Setting-up a formal function with people coming together to collaborate over a process model and workflows, assesses data continuously, helps recover bad data, and resolve issues with IT and process owners permanently.
Data protection often takes a risk-based-approach in most organizations I worked with, however, the benefits associated with managing customer’s privacy turns the organization into being a data-trust where customers can invest their data into. Re-emphasizing the benefits of managing customer data privacy with a formal set-of-practices creates trust in customers.
Also, I believe in having to share my experiences I gained in solving for certain challenges in organizations, and the resultant thought is the publication of my book – Data Management and Governance Services – Simple and Effective Approaches.
How do you see data management / the role of the CDO / IT changing in the next 2 – 3 years?
We are currently seeing data offices expanding their role to manage data privacy and security. Moreover, as technology advances, like digital, dev-ops, and block-chain, the need for processes that will manage data will increase. Cloud data capability adoption provides an opportunity to govern data across hybrid landscapes while alleviating the burden of platform management to some extent.
Do you have any planned next steps for your career?
I am the data protection officer at the third largest bank in India. I will continue to assist organizations in formalizing their data journeys and publish sponsorship models while monetizing data assets. My interest in digital customer experience developed as I worked with my current organization to develop data-based capabilities that are fueling digital journeys for customers.
What is the single best piece of advice you have received in your data management / IT career so far? Why has it been so important to you?
Most often, the focus is on the outcomes when it comes to data-related programs, and the advice when I was a mid-manager, made me focus on benefits management further to outcomes. This has been crucial for me evaluate how the capabilities implemented are strategically aligned to organizational priorities
Can you share something about yourself as a person that people wouldn’t know about you?
I am an abstract painter and travel for leisure.
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