Jeff Shortis, Chief Executive Officer of Data3Sixty
Jeff Shortis is the CEO and co-founder of Data3Sixty, a leading data governance SaaS solution provider. Prior to founding Data3Sixty, Jeff served as Chief Data Officer for Pioneer Investments where he led the global data strategy and evangelized the importance of data governance. Prior to Pioneer Investments, Jeff was product manager for the Eagle PACE, an industry leading investment management data warehouse. Jeff has also advised several financial services organizations in consulting capacities defining data strategies and standing up data governance teams. Jeff is recognized as one of the thought leaders in the data management industry.
“When I started out in the financial services industry, my career path was tilted more towards the technical, working with large volumes of data. This data had multiple origins and integrations within different applications and reported through a myriad of data warehouses and data marts. Back then my concerns were not about how my company interacted with that information, but focused squarely on the technical nature and process implications of moving or storing the data itself.
As my career evolved, I began to truly understand how organizations use their data, and formed an awareness of the growing number of inefficiencies that existed regarding how they interacted with it. Even simple things such as confusion about data definitions, how data was being sourced, or who had accountability. The magnitude of this problem grew exponentially as data was shared across multiple departments or business units.
One day while sitting in my office, then in the position of Chief Data Officer for a large global asset manager, I read a post on social media detailing what the poster had for breakfast that morning. In that moment, it occurred to me that we live in a networked world, where I could easily find out what someone’s breakfast selection without even speaking to them, yet struggled daily with basic data problems at my own organization. It was a real lightbulb moment for me: how do we apply same level of transparency to the data domain to help companies improve their data and collaborate through data problems?
That very thought is what inspired me to start my collaborative data governance company, with the purpose of bridging this transparency gap and to address the unmet needs of other businesses, while solving the unique data challenges that they face each day.
Speaking from personal experience, good data is more critical than ever to run the day-to-day functions of financial service companies. As data systems get more complex and data volumes grow, more companies are investing resources in more formalized data programs—hiring for CDOs and appointing data stewards, in order to succeed in the highly competitive new ‘data economy’. I truly believe organizations that effectively understand, leverage, and ultimately govern their data will maintain a huge advantage over their competitors.
As someone who has been working with data and its challenges for just about my entire career, I am excited by the growing importance companies are placing on data, its value and the opportunities it creates to make real, world-changing solutions.
In this upcoming blog series, I hope to share my personal experience from the vendor, the end-user, and the CDO perspective and pass along the knowledge I’ve gained to inform and challenge readers on today’s and tomorrow’s data challenges.”
