Assessing where asset managers stand in comparison to their peers when it comes to data management has traditionally been a subjective exercise. The good people at the EDM Council have been working to challenge the status quo and help our industry evolve toward having more quantifiable mechanisms to measure data management effectiveness. To this end, they have developed the ‘Data Management Capability Assessment Model’ (DCAM) which takes some of the subjectivity out of the process and introduces relevant criteria to investigate the key people, processes, and technologies impacting data management success.
Data is among the most important assets that investment managers have. Those who do the best job to carefully source, inspect, integrate, and mine data are best suited to reap its many rewards. Taking an honest account to identify opportunities for improvement and to celebrate the areas where things are done well is important.
Most companies perform annual evaluations of their other key asset—people—each year to help develop talent. Any legitimate company performs a routine assessments of their financial assets, often in the form of quarterly and annual reports. On a personal level, we have regular dental check-ups and physicals to assess our physical health, and accept feedback to make needed improvements. We should be doing the same with our data. Mechanisms such as the EDM Council’s DCAM is one very good way to do this.
Complacency is a killer in our industry. There is much we can learn from one another through assessing where we are today, sharing the results to enrich industry benchmarks, and comparing approaches with others to identify best of breed solutions. Sitting in isolation while others take critical evaluations to find their weaknesses and address them can lead to only one eventual outcome. Each of us has seen the proverbial dinosaurs in our industry, smug in their position and no longer seeking to improve, blissfully unaware that they are walking into the tar pits like the dinosaurs. But not you and I! We aren’t afraid to test ourselves and find where we can improve. It’s exam time, are you ready?
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