What is the value of data? Damien Moloney, Client Solutions, speaking at Finance 2.0

Interesting interview with Damien Moloney, Director of Data Insights, Client Solutions, who is speaking at Finance 2.0 – How Data Analytics and Warehousing is Innovating Finance and the Accounting Practice, tonight, October 23rd. See more details here.

What you are doing now?

Client Solutions have provided professional services for more than 25 years in Ireland. Our raison d’etre is to deliver innovative solutions to our customers that address real business challenges through the clever use of best of breed technology. Specifically, we are collaborating with a number of our customers on their Digital Transformation projects into Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure.
We continue to be one of the leading SAP services companies head quartered in Ireland. I manage the Data Insights team and am commercial director.

What is the value of data?

How was the last year, what worked well, what didn’t move as quickly as you would have liked?

Last year was a great year, we completed our MBO in June and it’s been invigorating carving out our future unencumbered by global parent companies. We have beaten our initial banking targets by over 30%.
Helping our customers leverage the agility of public cloud platforms has worked really well in the last year and previous years.

Our view is AI and ML is still gaining momentum in the Irish context. There has been some early adoption but we see this as a major area for growth in the coming years.

What are your plans for the future?

Continue to grow. Be true to our name. Become the leading Technology solutions provider by partnering with clients to realise their vision.

What will you be talking about at this event?

The focus of my talk falls under the umbrella of data governance, getting the balance between agility and rigor right for your organisation. People working in finance are experts with numbers, so are natural collaborators on data projects and consumers of data. DAMA has done a great job documenting best practice for data governance in their book of knowledge DMBOK2.

What inspired you to agree to be a speaker at this event?

I really enjoy supporting local networking and information share initiatives like this, particularly on topics relating to the management and use of data, which is my field of expertise. They are genuinely enjoyable and informative occasions, you get to hear a lot of perspectives and you generally learn a lot attending them.

Which influencers and websites do you follow to keep up to date with the latest developments?

On Twitter/Web Cindi Howson has produced some very good material over the years. She was an independent voice initially but now appears to be part of Gartners expert group. Michael Saylor (chairman of MicroStrategy) is good to follow, he’s a very insightful and engaging speaker on the topic of enterprise analytics.

On Linkedin I follow Bill Schmarzo, I’ve attended some of his presentations and he keeps what could be considered a dry topic interesting and fun. I don’t agree with all his proclamations but enjoy the discussion and the way he delivers his point of view. I follow our very own Shemas Eivers and John Thompson and have enjoyed reading their contributions on the topic of data. I also follow Uli Bethke
who’s part of DAMA Ireland whose pragmatic view on the correct use of technology to solve business problems resonates with me.

I read a lot of what is produced by the well-known advisory bodies, e.g. Gartner, Forrester. It’s important to use their annual reports as inputs to your decision making process but maybe not be over influenced by them. Finally I believe in attending events, especially local ones such as the DAMA and Analytics Institute
events in Dublin. I believe everyone who works with data should attend the upcoming November summit run by the Analytics Institute (www.analyticsinstitute.org)

How can people find out more about what you are working on?

A good place to start is our web site www.clientsolutions.ie where all our services are described. We also share a lot of our news on Linkedin, please feel free to follow us for the latest news https://www.linkedin.com/company/clientsolutions/

We host a number of events throughout the year that we announce on Linkedin, they are often technology agnostic, focused on common challenges we see in the marketplace. We support numerous events like this one (DAMA CAI Finance 2.0), SQL Saturday, those run by the Analytics Institute in addition to many Irish networking events, particularly in Cork and Dublin.

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

I think the key question going forward is going to be around data value. Estimates say that there are more Bytes currently generated daily than there are grains of sand in the world. Of course images
represent a huge proportion of this data but the reality is that business will need to reality check the
data requirements and apply some engineering back of envelope calculations to justify the “I have to
have it” messaging. I believe in careful planning and investment justification. Data lakes are
presented as the solution for a “just gather all the data” approaches but perhaps building something
people drown in is not a good idea for solving data issues long term.

Damien will be speaking at FINANCE 2.0

“How Data Analytics and Warehousing is Innovating Finance and the Accounting Practice”

See more interviews here.

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