Tackling Challenges With Data Governance

Akira Bell is senior vice president and CIO at Mathematica, a research and data analytics consultancy. Bell was a finalist for this year's MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award in recognition of her work at Mathematica to spearhead the launch of the data collaboration platform Mquiry, a turnkey system for onboarding and working with clients' data securely. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Bell to understand her role and how leaders should be thinking about their data. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you tell us about your role as the CIO of Mathematica?

Mathematica is a company of subject matter experts-social scientists, data scientists, economists and technologists who have a deep understanding of policies, practices, and data that impact public well-being around the world. Because of this, we're able to help our clients reimagine how they collect, analyze, and apply data to solve today's urgent social challenges.

My role at Mathematica spans what we consider the traditional CIO role, in that it has all of the internal responsibilities for infrastructure, security, network, communications, enterprise resource planning, policy, and so on. But we also have some of the backbone for the client-facing teams, where technologists from my team sit in with the business units and they work in concert. Our platforms for hosting client data and solutions are managed by our team as well.

How does Mathematica advise its clients on data governance?