Philadelphia AI and Internet of Things Meetup

PLEASE REGISTER ON THE DAMA PHILADELPHIA WEBSITE TO RECEIVE THE CORRECT ZOOM LINK FOR THE EVENT

11am-12pm EST: Terri Mikol - Data & Analytics Governance Advisor.
Better Data is Everyone's Job
Organizations know they need data governance for analytics and AI, but often lack the time, budget, or resources to launch another major program. This session presents a practical approach that uses the organization's existing people, skills, processes, and technology to improve data quality, clarify ownership, increase data literacy, and build sustainable governance without a large investment.
12pm-12:30pm EST: Marilu Lopez the owner and CEO of SEGDA company
Most organizations face pressure to extract value from their data. They often jump straight into implementing MDM initiatives, moving to the cloud, adopting advanced analytics, and now, integrating AI, without a solid understanding of the problems they need to solve or the priorities involved. However, there is a growing awareness of the importance of managing data more effectively, even though the path to achieving this remains unclear. A Data Strategy is essential for setting priorities and guiding resource allocation effectively. This session explains how to develop Data Strategies using the PAC (Pragmatic, Agile, and Communicable) Data Strategy Method.
Create your Data Strategies with the right stakeholders in a pragmatic, agile way, and communicate them effectively using a Canvas.
12:30 - 1:15pm EST: Swati Prasad - Senior Manager, Enterprise Data Governance — American Express. Founder, DataTrustHub | Creator, DataPolis.
Policy as Code, Compliance as a Token
Swati Prasad serves as Senior Manager of Enterprise Data Governance at American Express, where she leads initiatives focused on data quality, risk controls, and regulatory compliance frameworks. She is the founder and primary contributor to DataTrustHub, an online publication exploring real-world data governance, and creator of DataPolis, a storytelling series designed to make DAMA-DMBOK2 standards accessible across organizations. Her recent research work focuses on integrating smart contracts, pre-chain validation, and distributed ledger technologies to eliminate manual control vulnerabilities and establish authoritative single sources of truth for enterprise analytics and AI.
Data governance depends on custodians who verify where data came from and whether it followed policy. Today that verification happens after the fact, from metadata attached to the data set, which makes audits slow and leaves compliance failures to be found late.

This talk proposes moving verification into the data lifecycle itself. At each stage, a smart contract confirms that the relevant organizational policy was followed and issues a token as proof. The contract relies on an oracle, and the right oracle depends on how subjective the policy is: software code for objective rules, a decentralized committee for judgment calls, or a gatekeeper where accountability must rest with a named party. The final certification checks the full chain of tokens and attests to the compliance of the data. Because each token acts as a micro compliance record that is decentralized and independently verifiable, regulators can audit the record directly instead of relying on the custodian's account of it. The core argument is that policy written as code, paired with oracles matched to the policy, shifts governance from retrospective inspection to continuous proof, and makes the choice of oracle the central governance decision.