BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS, FROM WATERFALL TO AGILE:

“What, am I looking at?” That’s what I said to myself.  Then I thought, “Sanjay must have sent me the wrong file.”  Turns out, nope.  I had asked him for an audit log report.  My request was neither unusual nor surprising. I was, after all, the new privacy officer for Sanjay’s business unit.  I received an email from him sans subject line with one large excel file attached; also not surprising, he was the lead software developer.  I opened the file and began to scroll.  Scroll as I might, I had not found the end of the document after 90 seconds. I tried scrolling both horizontally and vertically, as if doing so would help me make sense of the multitude of alpha numeric columns and rows that created a data maze on my computer screen.  The scrolling did not help.

Huge data breaches exposing the personal information of enormous numbers of people have become a regular occurrence, manifested recently by hackers’ theft of the data of 500 million Yahoo users.  The risks of data breaches can lead to identity theft and can be magnified as businesses use Big Data tools analyze masses of information to attempt to predict our behavior.

Last year, an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Compliance Officer: Dream Career” discussed the massive growth of compliance jobs, emphasizing hiring for new compliance positions in the financial services industry. Just last month, New York Comptroller Tom DiNapoli identified hiring in compliance as driving growth in Wall Street employment in the first half of 2015.

Employment opportunities in financial services compliance are booming for two interrelated reasons.