Tackling Challenges With Data Governance

Akira Bell is senior vice president and CIO at Mathematica, a research and data analytics consultancy. Bell was a finalist for this year’s MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award in recognition of her work at Mathematica to spearhead the launch of the data collaboration platform Mquiry, a turnkey system for onboarding and working with clients’ data securely. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Bell to understand her role and how leaders should be thinking about their data. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

MIT Sloan Management Review: Can you tell us about your role as the CIO of Mathematica?

Akira Bell: Mathematica is a company of subject matter experts — social scientists, data scientists, economists — and technologists who have a deep understanding of policies, practices, and data that impact public well-being around the world. Because of this, we’re able to help our clients reimagine how they collect, analyze, and apply data to solve today’s urgent social challenges.

My role at Mathematica spans what we consider the traditional CIO role, in that it has all of the internal responsibilities for infrastructure, security, network, communications, enterprise resource planning, policy, and so on. But we also have some of the backbone for the client-facing teams, where technologists from my team sit in with the business units and they work in concert. Our platforms for hosting client data and solutions are managed by our team as well.

How does Mathematica advise its clients on data governance?

Bell: Our conversations tend to start with compliance. It’s just a starting point, but making sure that our clients are compliant with regulations is what allows us to start working together. We started Mathematica with a strong foundation on data security, focused on making sure that our clients and partners could trust that their data was going to be managed in the way that it was intended. Sometimes we’re capturing data that is very private or dealing with vulnerable populations, so it must be held and secured in trust. That needs to be a forethought, not an afterthought.

The second thing we ask partners and clients to think about is interoperability. One of the hopes for Mquiry is that it allows more sharing of data across collaborating parties in an ecosystem that can yield a greater set of insights. It’s important to understand what any given company’s secret sauce is, but that answer is going to be different for every company. One of the main challenges we see with clients is maintaining data cleanliness and data integrity, which is what allows you to see what’s good about your data and whether what your data is telling you is real. Leaders are often asking, “Do we have enough data?” And the answer is often that they do. It’s the sensemaking about the data that tends to go astray. Traditionally, clients would come to us with a specific question they wanted answered, but increasingly, they want us to help them explore the data to see what they can find.

Finally, the ethical use of data is important. Our social scientists and technologists spend a lot of time helping people understand issues of equity and bias that can exist with data and how it gets analyzed.

What are the crucial issues that CIOs should be working on in the next five years?

Bell: I think it’s always going to be about being nimble and ready for change. Right now, that change is about AI. We need to get rid of the noise around AI and make sure we’re homing in on the right signals and making smart investments. AI needs to be used to amplify that secret sauce I talked about, which will be different at every company. Where it’s not doing that, it’s OK to let one of your providers handle the innovation in those places. It’s important for CIOs and other technology and business leaders to have that clarity and not get caught up in hype.