VIDEO | Vanguard CDAO: We Drive Business Outcomes with Data Analytics

(US and Canada) Vanguard Group CDAO and Principal Ryan Swann speaks with David Mariani, AtScale CTO and Founder, about establishing data literacy across the organization, building a mature data ecosystem, and Vanguard's role in promoting literacy and wise tool usage.

According to Swann, it is fundamental to approach data literacy in both a bottom-up and top-down manner to inculcate it as a part of the organization's persona. The routine aspects of data literacy are for everyone, but the bespoke aspects pertain to data scientists, data engineers, or machine learning engineers, he adds.

Swann states that it is important to develop the crew's skills, be it Python, distributed ledger, or Tableau. Referring to a noteworthy increase in the number of Excel users compared to the past, he reckons that a similar shift is happening in the data and analytics space. Swann encourages enhancing organizational literacy through videos, organizing analytics days, hackathons, and innovation days.

He also stresses the importance of creating a mature data ecosystem, adding that data analysts and scientists spend 50-60% of their time finding and cleaning data. Swann states that metadata reduces time consumption. He explains that the storytelling builds literacy, and metadata delivers the next steps.

Swann reveals that having data analytics teams working in silos across business units led to centralizing them to enable analysts to focus on activities that drive value and reduce risk. He mentions the hub and spoke model where the center of excellence acts as the hub comprising data science, AI, and ML, and where they research natural language processing and behavioral science.

Speaking about transformation, Swann indicates that Vanguard is scaling data analytics into business processes to drive efficiency in below-the-line activities. He considers data science, behavioral science, AI, and ML as the centralized hub, and data and analytics as spokes. On centralization, Swann says it is necessary for the data and analytics teams to stay close to the business since they drive business outcomes.

Finally, Swann addresses the unique rotational culture at Vanguard where individuals have multiple careers. He says they rotate from business to IT to human resources and back to business to spread knowledge and get best practices in place.