Women’s Month Special | American Express SVP, Enterprise Data Governance & Platforms: Data Governance Is About Ensuring Ownership and Accountability

(US and Canada) Danielle Cloud, Senior VP of Enterprise Data Governance and Platforms at American Express, speaks with Asha Saxena, Founder & CEO, WLDA.tech, in an International Women’s Month special video interview about her journey as a woman in a technology profession, her approach to data governance strategy, and getting the fundamentals right to adopt new technologies. This interview is part of a CDO Magazine special series celebrating women in data science, machine learning, and analytics.

Cloud studied industrial engineering and started her professional journey as an intern at American Express a little over two decades ago. As she progressed, she witnessed other women working hard and taking various leadership positions. She says that women today are not only rising but turning around and helping other women rise.

Cloud explains that American Express believes data powers everything and that delivering the best customer experience is problematic if the data is unreliable. She also says a governance program should be used to meet compliance requirements, attract talent, and grow business.

Cloud also points out that senior management supports creating data roles like data stewards and custodians. The key task is to encourage awareness, train, and generate support for these roles.

She asserts that data governance is about ensuring ownership, accountability, and reinforcing trust in data as a foundation for newer technologies. Cloud emphasizes that unlocking new possibilities is only possible if the data feeding new technology like AI is good.

Cloud adds that data readiness and governance cannot be a check-the-box activity. Instead, American Express fosters data literacy and embedding within processes in the organization. Data team members regularly meet with senior business unit executives with federated data office responsibilities to help them understand their data and how it affects their products.

Addressing the issue of unequal maturity across departments within an organization, Cloud says that if specific business units do something well, it is shared with the other business units to help them come up to speed. That curious and agile mindset is a game changer for the journey, she notes.

Continuing, Cloud highlights a best practice to succeed in the data field. She says that data leaders need to recognize that everyone has a role to play in data, whether in the discovery work or on the consumption side.

She also stresses the need to measure and report. Cloud urges data leaders to talk with the business units launching new technologies and ensure that everything is approached from a data perspective, along with the agile process.

CDO Magazine appreciates Danielle Cloud for sharing her insights and data success stories with our global community.