Michael Baraz
Passionate, innovative, curious, information professional
defining and aligning strategy, capabilities, security, and privacy, and
leading and motivating people to deliver successful, high value/high impact
outcomes. Combining pragmatic business acumen with technical savvy as a thought
leader, transforming and implementing scalable global information governance
and quality, strategy and architecture, information management, advanced
analytics, cloud platforms using proven and emerging technologies driving top
line and bottom-line impacts in insurance, banking, financial, real estate,
health, utilities, energy, and safety organizations.
Core Competencies
|
ü Strategy and Roadmap ü Business Intelligence ü Data Governance Program ü Data Privacy and Security ü Cloud Security and Computing |
ü Data Quality and Profiling ü Metadata and Glossary Management ü Master Data Management ü AWS and Azure Cloud Analytics Platform ü Digital Transformation Leadership |
ü Team Building and Development ü Agile Scrum Project Management ü Portfolio and Program Management ü Stakeholder Engagement ü Ideation and Funding Projects |
Professional Experience
Head
of Global Finance Data Office (consultant) April 2020 – current
Walgreens Boots Alliance | Deerfield, IL
Part of the Finance transformation executive leadership to
reorganize department using SAP S4, SAP BW, and the Finance Analytics Platform
for executive leadership dashboards and reporting. Led team of six direct
reports. Created data strategy, data governance, and quality program, executive
data council, “citizen data” stewardship, enriched business glossary,
provenance/data lineage, data quality, master data management, data
classification, privacy, compliance, and other uses. Implemented value-based demand
management process for intake, evaluation, prioritizing, funding, and staffing initiatives.
Acquired and implemented Collibra data governance and Ataccama data quality
tools for business glossary, report catalog, metric/KPI catalog business rules,
data quality rules, data models, architecture, etc. Accelerated financial modeling,
analytics, and other data consumers time-to-value with monetization and
innovative data products, while assuring compliance and risk management as part
of Business Process Improvement. Instituted data sharing and entitlement
controls. Capabilities provide $3-4M annually in cost aversion on consulting
projects alone.
Created the Finance Data Council to align strategies,
roadmap, and execution. Led a team of
direct reports and responsible for business and technical data stewardship and
SME activities in areas of the Finance business area.
Designed program to increase time-to-insights,
time-to-value, and time-to-market. Program in partnership with FP&A and Tax
to cut 30,000 hours off report production and 10,000 hours off preparation of
returns, respectively, bringing more than $7M in savings.
Global
Head of Data Governance and Data Quality June 2019 – February 2020
AXIS Capital | Chicago, IL
Reported to Chief Data Officer. Reorganized
enterprise data governance and quality functions creating a hybrid
enterprise/federated operating model. Led 11 direct reports. Established
relationships with line-of-business functions and created workgroups to bring
value to data, aligning and negotiating within and across LOBs and project
teams. Created and developed data governance framework. Led team to qualify,
assess, negotiate, and purchase Collibra as a strategic data governance tool to
define, catalog, automate processes, profile, lineage diagram, data policies,
data sharing agreements, and orchestrate group goals and execution, for
internal and external (third-party) data. Instituted performance metrics for
governance and quality functions to validate success. Created issues management
processes and tools. Supported Data Protection Officer to identity and tag sensitive
data for regulatory (GDPR, CCPA, et al) compliance. Created service for all
common reference data using MDM hub for publisher/subscriber distribution and
real-time web-services access; oversee prioritization by business value.
Successes of data initiatives improved efficiencies of top-level financial
operations saving 11,500 hours annually.
VP,
Head of Information Architecture and Governance April 2016 – September 2018
Gallagher Bassett Services | Rolling Meadows, IL
Reported to Chief Architect. Responsible
for the vision and strategy for the management of all information assets, to
enable high-value data consumers and for the architecture, security, and
implementation of hybrid on-premises and multi-cloud platforms. Assure HIPAA
and GDPR compliance in our claims, payer, and third-party administration in
worker's compensation (healthcare), commercial and personal lines. Prepare
readiness for CCPA.
Created data governance program to
support “citizen data” stewardship, enriched business glossary, provenance/data
lineage, analytics on data usage, profiling, security and privacy, compliance,
and other uses. Responsible for proposing, securing funding, and staffing
project. This approach accelerated realization of modelers, analytics, and
other data consumers time-to-market with monetization and innovative data
products.
Created cloud data strategy and led
design of a FISMA moderate cloud architecture to support a data lake from
internal and external sources on AWS using machine learning/artificial intelligence,
and text analytics. Full build-out creates a hybrid solution with AWS,
Microsoft Azure, and on-premises platforms with identity management,
single-sign on, and virtualized access services via web services and direct
access. Responsible for proposing, securing funding, and staffing project. Led vendors
teams implementing architecture. Co-lead on building
microservice architecture to exchange data within and with trading partners.
Participate in Object Management Group Insurance Working Group
to create industry reference models.
Technology Strategy Lead (Consultant) March
2015 – March 2016
State Farm Bank | Bloomington, IL
Organized and led team of five to
create an information technology strategy initiating the Technology Strategy
Office to govern operational, compliance, analytics, and business performance
management systems. Developed a roadmap that specified implementing an
application integration hub, synchronizing customer information and their
transactions across the various banking service offerings on the various
vendor-managed platforms. The goal was to create a single pane of glass that a
customer would see all their current account information in real-time.
Enterprise
Information Architect (Consultant) May
2014 – February 2015
Underwriters Laboratories, LLC | Northbrook, IL
Led architecture for a complete
digital transformation, converting more than 100 years of engineering safety
tests to a library capable of generating engineers with guidance for new client
product testing. This was used in recommendation engine to develop test plans
and increase turn-around to customers by 5-10 times and saving weeks of
engineering. This delighted customers by enabling them to bring products to
market much more quickly and substantially decreased their costs. My team and I
developed an Enterprise Information Architecture to achieve the vision for
engineers to mine and leverage historical customer product test results stored
in various unstructured text and scanned-image documents in a Big Data Hub to
unlock and maximize reuse in customer product testing and component library and
analytics. Identified information capability gaps, defined and aligned
Information Architecture with other Enterprise Architecture disciplines, i.e.
Integration Architecture, Application Architecture and Technical Architecture,
and the management and governance.
Enterprise
Information Architect (Consultant) June
2012 – May
2014
JLL | Lombard, IL
Reported to Chief Technology Officer. Developed an information
strategy and vision for aligning corporate business strategy for global
enterprise with strategic and line-of-business applications, master data
management (MDM), data integration, data virtualization, metadata management,
and governance, to allow operations teams to work across accounts teams and platform.
Working closely with CIO, develop IT innovation strategy, gap analysis,
roadmap, business case development and investment decisions and support
frequent mergers and acquisition. Architect and engineer of MDM and Data
Integration hub synchronizing major line-of-business and enterprise applications
enabling and optimizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Property and
Markets with multiple global mission-critical applications.
Data
Governance Lead (Consultant) October
2011 –
June 2012
BP U.S. Pipeline and Logistics | Naperville, IL
Responsible for developing the information strategy and vision for
aligning corporate business strategy for global enterprise with strategic and
line-of-business applications, master data management (MDM), data integration,
data virtualization, metadata management, data quality and profiling, data
modeling and data governance. Working closely with leadership, define IT
strategy, gap analysis, roadmap, business case development and investment
decisions, and support frequent mergers and acquisition.
Data
Governance Program Lead (Consultant) February
2011 –
October 2011
Bank of the West, BNP Paribas | San Francisco, CA
Reported to Chief Risk Officer. Worked with line of business leaders
to align business strategies and objectives with development of a data strategy
to enable regulatory and operational management and analytics requirements.
Defined and prioritized business needs and requirements for EDW for credit risk
and Basel II compliance. Used COBIT compliance framework for auditability,
security, risk management and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). Developed
Master Data Management approach using a federated model, create
proof-of-concept. Led business and EDW team of 22
direct and indirect reports to put data governance around financial, operational and derived data elements. Created conformed
semantic model based on risk architecture and business intelligence with
analytics needs.
Data
Strategy Principal August
2010 – December 2010
Maven Wave Partners LLC | Chicago, IL
Data Strategy for Nike,
a leading consumer-products company. Co-lead in a business-driven strategic
blueprint for technology-based services that provide deep insights to consumer
preferences and behaviors based on inferences, affinities and correlations from
biometric devices and customer profiles.
Data Management Lead for CIT Bank, a commercial banking
institution. Performed end-to-end assessment of the enterprise and business
units' operational and reporting applications and data architecture. Created a
Data Governance program with an executive council governing people, processes
and tools to manage Metadata Management, Data Quality and Master Data
Management. Enterprise data governance program assures data would be managed in
a way that assured accuracy, timeliness and integrity.
Enterprise
Architect/Data Strategy (Consultant) February
2010 –
August 2010
American Access Casualty Company| Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Developed strategic capabilities within the IT department, advance the
maturity of the department to provide scalability in systems, improve software
development methods to ensure best practices in application and data
architecture for future capabilities and growth. Designed new application
server platform architecture with failover and load-balancing as well as
improve network and application security. Developed new application
architecture using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via web services.
Developed master data management (MDM) architecture.
Senior
Principal Data Architect November
2007 – February 2010
STA Group | Chicago, IL
Enterprise Information Architect consultant to Aetna Insurance, Hartford,
CT. Responsible for defining IT strategy and architecture in terms of the
enterprise capabilities in full lifecycle of use of data, assessing the current
state, developing a future state architecture. Created blueprints for Quote and
Rating, Claims and auto-adjudication/auto-pay domains application refreshes. Used
MEGA enterprise architecture modeling tool to capture data architecture and
relate to systems. Created conceptual and logical models, used Universal Data
Model reference model.
Data Architect consultant to State Farm Insurance, Bloomington, IL.
Enabled enterprise Data Model management for entity-relational diagrams for
transactional systems and star schema models for data warehouses, defined
logical model standards, defined physical model standards. Created and delivered
course to select Data Warehouse team members, Agile for Data Professionals to improve, evangelize Agile to data
teams.
EDUCATION and CERTIFICATIONS
Collibra Data Governance Center multiple certificates
AWS Well-Architected Certificate
Certified Information Security
Specialist, Data Management Institute
Certified Data Protection Specialist,
Data Management Institute
Post-Graduate Studies in Data Science,
Johns Hopkins University
Post-Graduate Studies in Big Data,
University of California, San Diego
Scrum Master, Scrum Alliance
TOGAF Enterprise Architect Certification,
The Open Group Architecture Foundation
Master’s of Business Administration (MBA), Florida International University, Miami, FL
Bachelor’s of Business Administration (BBA), Finance and Management Information Systems (majors),
Computer Science (minor), Florida
International University, Miami, FL