Every Monday morning we fire five questions at a C-suite tech industry interviewee. Today we’re pleased to be joined by Informatica CISO, Roger Hale.
Biggest Challenge for your Clients?
To be competitive in today’s market requires being able to pivot faster than your competitors; and that means having the right data to make the right decision, at the right time. The biggest challenge to getting the best in real-time business insights, is not what data technology to use, it’s down to culture. An insights-led organisation requires a data-driven culture. Cultural change must come from the top, and it doesn’t happen
Roger Hale, CISO, Informatica. Credit: SRK Headshot Day
overnight. It requires business leaders to embed into the fabric of the organisation that data is a strategic imperative. But how?
When data is siloed to a single department within an organisation, the culture needs to shift towards democratising data across the organization by giving control to assigned data owners, or “stewards”, who can expand its access to other departments and people that need it. Marrying this with automation and governance, while maintaining the data stewards’ ownership and responsibilities, fosters a data-driven culture.
Technology that Excites you Most?
I’m enthused by technology that solves a real-world challenge. A lot of today’s technology is designed to solve a point problem, but if you take a broader view, there are plenty of real-world issues to address where technology can provide multiple benefits. When I review technology, I look to ask what is the business problem I am solving, not the technical or “compliance” problem.
Good tech will provide a more efficient and effective technical solution while providing business value. A great example is our Secure@Source solution, which not only identifies the location of your critical data in your disparate data repositories, it also provides continuous validation for regulatory reporting and remediation. So, it doesn’t just solve the visibility or discovery problem, but the ongoing governance and assurance that allows customers to trust their vendors.
With data privacy high on everyone’s agenda, it’s one of the reasons why I am excited by Informatica, which is providing organisations of all sizes with solutions that integrate governance with protection.
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Greatest Success?
Not being in the news for a security breach (just kidding). Seriously, I feel my greatest success is my team. I’m extremely proud of the business and professional relationships that I’ve developed over the years. Today, my global team of security and risk professionals includes leaders who have worked with me in more than one previous company. They are people who have helped me to build a culture of secure business enablement. They provide me with the visibility and strategic insight needed to embed data governance and deliver on our mission statement:
- Protect the Company
- Protect our Customers
- Be the Customer (use our own products)
Worst Failure?
When I was first starting out, I worked for a financial institution that offered business loans to companies to finance R&D or growth. On one occasion, I was asked to provide the technical evaluation of a new internet communications company. I met with the engineers, looked at their packet loss and jitter rates and wrote a technically accurate report concluding that DSL would have a low chance of business adoption due to its lower integrity than ISDN, resulting in their loan application being denied.
Of course, while my evaluation was technically accurate (for that moment in time), I’d failed to factor how lower packet loss was only beneficial to a certain magnitude. And as we all know today, DSL has more than proven its business value.
What did I learn? That any opportunity or challenge needs to be viewed from at least three different perspectives: the business point of view, the technical view, and the practical view. It was a hard lesson to learn but I’m thankful that I learned it early in my career.
In Another Life I’d Be…
More courageous. I have a career that I am very proud of, but that has involved mostly working for corporations. I have so much respect for entrepreneurs who put everything on the line to build a product, company, or idea. Taking that leap again and again, while not always being successful, to me defines true courage.
See also: Five Questions with… Dean Stoecker, Co-Founder and CEO, Alteryx
