Pablo Manuel García Corzo (T-Systems Iberia) among the protagonists of the Data Management Summit Tour Barcelona

We are unveiling day after day all those professionals who will participate with their presentations at the most important event in Data Management. For the first time a forum tries to focus on Data Management in its entirety, from governance, through security, cloud, machine learning, data virtualization and much more. Today we introduce Pablo Manuel García Corzo, Expert Sales Data/AI at T-Systems Iberia.

Tell us a little about your professional career.

Physicist by training, throughout my career I have gone through almost all the relevant roles involved in any Data project. I started in Medical Physics research, developing optimization algorithms and data exploitation, then I worked as DevOps in automation and QA teams evolving as a solution architect in AIOps projects, I have led development and support teams, first as a technical leader and then as Product Owner, which led me naturally towards knowledge and business value generation, moving from the pre-sales branch to sales specialized in Data projects where I am now.

Along the way, I have been fortunate to work side by side with customers from very different verticals with whom I have learned a lot about their business without losing contact with the technical component. The latter has enriched me enormously, allowing me to acquire a transversal vision of technology as a lever and to transfer good practices from one area to another.

Do you think that companies have an adequate culture for managing data?

I think the world is evolving very fast and at very different speeds depending on the companies and sectors. In my opinion, in the industry in general, a certain maturity has been reached in terms of working methodologies and product orientation from the point of view of microservices architectures and “traditional” IT. However, when it comes to data projects, that same philosophy and best practices, which would seem natural to transfer in an analogous way, are not catching up to the pace one would expect.

In my opinion, the data management culture is still a step behind. Perhaps this is due to an effect of the extreme speed with which technology (and AI in particular) has burst into the market, pre-empting regulations, and forcing many companies to fall back on improvisation to follow market trends, which has led management professionals to worry almost solely about regulatory compliance, leaving business value generation more to the side.

How are you approaching data management in your company and what are the most important challenges you are currently facing?

One of the recurring issues we see with our clients is data quality and it comes from a lack of empowerment of the business areas with respect to data products. From my perspective, for years we data professionals have been preaching things like “data is the new gold” and generating expectations of new markets that the industry wasn’t ready to understand. This has led many business managers to make decisions based on trends, to invest large amounts of resources to store data without having use cases or to launch more or less haphazardly proofs of concept of new technologies because it is what the market demands without stopping to think about the return on investment.

Helping our clients to regain control of the technology and put it at the service of the business is the great challenge, and for this we have to help them to identify and prioritize the use cases properly and build frameworks and methodologies that help them to maintain control, quality and business value of data products, which is where they should focus.

We are fortunate to have you on the roundtable entitled: “Challenges and Opportunities of Distributed Data Architecture: Exploring Data Fabric, Data Mesh and Open Platforms” interesting argument?

Without a doubt, different data architectures define very different ways of interacting with the business. The traditional DataLake concepts that started to become popular in the early days of BigData led business areas to “dump” their data by delegating responsibilities to Data or IT departments.

In my opinion, this is a basic mistake and for there to be an empowerment of the business over technology, data and data products must be distributed in the different business domains, which are the ones that know them, understand them and have the ability to generate value from them.

In addition, working with these distributed architectures within the company helps to generate a culture and prepare for the new global markets that are emerging around DataSpaces and that aim to be an essential pillar of growth in a few years in all sectors.

You have supported the event from the beginning… why is the Data Management Summit so important?

We live in a world where technology hypes dominate the news, events and even the market.

The Data Management Summit is in my opinion a very necessary forum in that it is concerned with how companies can assimilate these trends and take advantage of technology by covering the organizational needs and laying the necessary foundations…

In a way, I see the Data Management Summit as helping to bring some reality and “common sense” to companies struggling to extract value from data.