2018-2019 exchange Winter 2019 Newsletter FINAL | Page 16

Jen: To what extent do you actively solicit feedback from the business
regarding the information you are providing to them?
Glenn: I run a corporate data science team and, on any given project,
we work extremely closely with the business area. We have joint pro-
ject teams, which typically consist of data scientists, people from the
business area and people from technology. Technology is needed for
data access and productionalizing any application that comes out of
the project. The teams have weekly meetings, which are essential be-
cause a lot of the subject matter expertise comes from the business
team.
Jen: When it comes to the Right to Be Forgotten, which is part of
GDPR, how will companies respond to people who want their da-
ta deleted? I’m sure there would be a level of technical difficulty, es-
pecially if you don’t have a data map.
Glenn: There is quite a bit of technical difficulty because not only
are you talking about the primary system but the data that typi-
cally proliferates to multiple systems. It goes from the original
sales and marketing systems to an underwriting system to a claims
system to a consumer relationship management system to a billing
system to a fraud detection system. So, the data proliferates to many
systems and, of course, these systems have back-ups that go in vari-
ous directions because if there is an outage you don’t want to lose the
data. So, you would have to delete the data from all of those systems
and the back-ups, which is somewhat cumbersome. I think most com-
panies today in the U.S. don’t yet have the infrastructure to do all that
so that would have to be built, which does involve cost.
Jen: Thank you for sharing all of this valuable information.
Glenn: You’re welcome.
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