From Lake to Reservoir - Harnessing Big Data’s Power for the Enterprise

Big data is being thrown around as a silver bullet solution to enable organizational agility and transformation. All your data in one place sounds great on paper. In this presentation we will follow the big data journey of the world’s biggest payment processor who came dangerously close to building a data swamp before pivoting to embrace a governance and quality first patterns. We will include patterns, partners, successes, failures and lessons learned to date as well as review the journey ahead.

Tom Place is the Director of Data Management at First Data Corporation, where he has been leading their enterprise data initiatives since January 2015. Tom currently focuses on pivoting the organization’s transactional data to a value-add asset through development of an enterprise data lake, governance and quality controls, enabling new product development as well as optimization of existing sales channels. Prior to First Data, Tom had over a decade of experience leading enterprise data technology initiatives in capital markets on both the buy and sell side. Tom holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Nottingham in England.