Jennifer Agnes, managing director, US, Cynozure Group

I spent 20 years in a variety of global leadership positions at GE Capital in the US and France, working in real estate, risk management, six sigma and enterprise data. When GE Capital began to dissolve, I moved to Credit Suisse as its first CDO for risk and finance data and then to Schneider Electric as its first group CDO to set the foundations for its data excellence journey. 

Beyond luck and some great mentors, I credit my success to a willingness to learn, adapt and grow with the teams and times around me. My trifecta for success in data is that I take a business-centric perspective, I’m passionate about getting to know the people I work with by building trusted relationships and understanding the culture where I am working, and finding ways to give back by helping peers, teammates and leaders be successful in their journeys.    

What are your key areas of focus for data and analytics in 2022?

This year, my focus is helping businesses understand and believe in the need for excellence in data management. And by data management I mean the suite of disciplines and capabilities to bring about sustainable and long-lasting change to how we work with data every day. This ranges from basic data governance foundations and dataops in action, to data quality, data risk management and data ethics. New tools and technologies support this body of work and when combined with good data management, they can enable our data scientists and business teams to discover more about what we can do to grow our business, optimize costs and reduce risk.