From Monoliths to Integrated Lego Blocks

Cara Tice favors interoperable best-of-breed capabilities over one massive platform, emphasizing integration and human-centered change management.

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Episode notes

Why "America's data steward" is more than a job title, and what it takes to keep fraud intelligence trustworthy in the age of AI agents.

In this episode of AI Radicals, guest host Susan Wilson, Sales Leader at Alation, talks with Cara Tice, Chief Data Officer at Early Warning (the company behind Zelle), about what data stewardship really means when trillions of dollars in real-time payments, and the fraud intelligence protecting them, run on your data.

Cara and Susan dig into why data products have replaced the "one data platform to rule them all" mentality, why integration and change management matter more than any single tool, and why AI doesn't create data problems, it just exposes the ones that were already there.

"Your AI governance is reliant on your data management program. Make sure you've got data governance up and running, because AI is going to rely on your data management controls and the context you create."

Listen to this episode to learn:

Why "data products" — not centralized platforms — are the fastest path to trustworthy, reusable data
Why AI governance is really just an extension of data governance, and why the two leaders need to be joined at the hip
What a new CDO should fix (and what to leave alone) in their first 90 days on the job

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“As a CDO or as a data steward, you need to be obsessed with the customer outcome. Don't lose sight of that. It's easy to lose sight of it when you are focused on plumbing and fixing this issue and that issue. You always have to remind yourself of what's the bigger picture, what's the north star? With data products, you become relentless about the customer outcome because you're delivering to a specific business need, you're creating more capability that is business centric around data. When I think about the features that you would need for data science models, it's the same. Whether your consumer is a data scientist or is a commercial consumer, that data is used to make a decision. So you need to make sure that it's accurate.” – Cara Tice

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Time Stamps

[03:04] Stewardship vs. governance — and what "America's data steward" actually means

[06:49] What governed data means when the cost of being wrong is fraud

[09:41] Speed and precision in fraud modeling, and why data is fragmented everywhere

[10:55] Data products: tables, joins, and eating the vegetables without knowing it

[13:54] Progress vs. perfection — and where perfection is non-negotiable

[16:30] The monolith is gone. Now it's Lego blocks (but not too many)

[17:56] The thing that gets you every time: change management

[20:50] Vertical slices, quick value, and the CFO's "where's my return?"

[22:35] What Cara rebuilds in every CDO role — and what she leaves alone

[29:17] The grocery store analogy: connecting the catalog to business outcomes