Where's the Right Place to Get My Data? Improving Data Management Maturity Through System Certification

The system landscape at a very large, 172-year-old company can be a spaghetti diagram of complexity. Users often struggle to determine the right place for sourcing their data. Through our data governance program, we’ve adopted a process where we require systems to reach a minimum level of data management maturity to be certified as a System of Origin, System of Record, or Authoritative Data Source.

This session gives an overview of how we implemented a system certification process at American Express. Topics include:

• Prioritizing systems for governance
• Classifying systems to understand their role and requirements as it relates to Critical Data Elements
• Developing our System Certification Process, aka our Data Management “Health Assessment”
• Scoring Methodology
• System Maturity versus Program Maturity

Speakers: Laurel Shifrin and Sameer Puranik

Laurel Shifrin

Laurel has spent her career in the data world-leading data architecture and data governance to maximize the value of an organization’s data and minimize the risk and cost. She’s worked with both customer-facing, unstructured/semi-structured content and back-office, highly structured data. She holds a master’s degree in Library and Information Science and is currently the Vice President for Data Architecture within the Enterprise Data Governance group at American Express.

Sameer Puranik

Sameer is a technologist at heart and has extensive experience in solution architecture, data governance, data engineering, data architecture, and product management. Throughout his career, Sameer has gained significant expertise in financial reporting, process optimization, regulatory compliance regulations, and regulatory process controls. He is currently the Director of Data Architecture and System Certification within the Enterprise Data Governance group at American Express.