Data management is no longer just about project completion, but rather a strategic method to improve customer experience and operational efficiency of the company. Graeme Thompson (pictured), senior vice president and chief information officer for Informatica LLC, arrived at this realization after talking to project officers, other CIOs, and customers. As a result, Informatica has shifted focus.

“We’re opening up all these opportunities where you can take usage information and make it available to our customer support organization, so they can [then] proactively help our customer adopt the product,” Thompson explained. “It’s now a connected life cycle of the customer’s experience with your product, and it’s all based on the data. The applications and the processes are just the things that generate it.”

Thompson spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed Informatica’s new data management model and future roles within the company. (* Disclosure below.)

Moving forward

Informatica recently transformed from a company focused on “traditional software” to a “cloud and subscription”-based company, Thompson explained. In doing so, it formed the chief data officer role under the CIO.

The role was created to ensure that whatever breaks in the future does not continue to break. In essence, the CDO oversees self-service analytics across the company, a method that diminishes the need for information technology help.

Due to changing data management demands, Thompson has also created a model he urges other CIOs to adopt. “You can search for where all your customer data lives, you can search for where all your product data lives, you can figure out where it moves, and that is the first thing that I would advise a CIO to do,” he concluded, citing Informatica’s new Enterprise Data Catalog product.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Informatica World event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2018. Neither Informatica LLC, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE