The Northern Trust Corp. has found regulations mandated by Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulations to be valuable guidelines in the company’s efforts to ensure clean, quality data, despite the law’s potential as a limiting factor.

“We are treating GDPR as a foundation to our data governance program,” said Sanjay Saxena (pictured), senior vice president of enterprise data governance at Northern Trust Corp. Saxena specifically recognizes GDPR laws as fundamental in the data quality strategy at his company.

Saxena spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed Saxena’s tools and methods for maintaining data under GDPR, as well as the benefits of highly regulated information for customers and businesses alike. (* Disclosure below.)

As data volume increases and creates issues around discoverability for companies, Saxena is taking an approach rooted in the highest level of protection to provide the best customer experience. “There’s a huge amount of synergy between GDPR and information security. … We are in a systematic fashion trying to figure out where all our sensitive data is and whether it is controlled, protected, etc. … All these things come together very nicely from a GDPR perspective,” he said.

Clean data for stronger customer relationships

GDPR provides a guideline for better serving customers when the volume and categories of data are virtually limitless, according to Saxena. “What we are doing in GDPR is mapping out sensitive data across hundreds of applications and creating that baseline for the whole company so that any time a regulator comes in and wants to know where a particular person’s information is, we should be able to tell them in no uncertain terms,” he said.

In addition to developing client relationships, regulated data enables more effective marketing for businesses. “Now you have that information tagged, it’s all nicely calibrated in repositories … you can use that for your analytics, you can use that for your topline growth, or even see what your internal processes are that can make you more effective from an operations perspective,” Saxena said.

With an amount of structured and unstructured data that feels incomprehensible, companies like IBM are proving valuable by offering tools to help organize information, according to Saxena. “There are … tools available in the marketplace, including IBM’s tools, which help you map the data. … There are other tools that help you develop a metadata repository,” he stated.

As data becomes increasingly valuable, and quality harder to come by, Northern Trust Corp. is turning its attention to recruitment and talent development to maintain productivity. “It’s hard to recruit in these areas. … We get interns … who have the technology knowledge, and we couple them up with business experts to work in collaborative teams,” Saxena said.

These efforts coupled with a commitment to strong customer relationships has Saxena confident in his company’s ability to keep pace with data innovations. “It’s still evolving from my perspective. … Have we attained a state of perfection? No. We are getting there in terms of more optimization, more emphasis, and more money and financials being put on data quality,” Saxena concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE