Charles Mulwa

  Charles Mulwa on 20 Years in Data Leadership: From Citi to Southwest Airlines I still remember the first time I sat in front of a raw dataset and realized I had no idea what story it was trying to tell me. That was almost twenty years ago, early in my career at Citi, staring at rows of consumer payment histories that meant nothing until someone asked the right question of them. I didn't know it then, but that moment - the gap between "here is data" and "here is insight" - would end up defining my entire career. My name is Charles Mulwa, and I've spent the last two decades building, governing, and leading data organizations across four very different industries: financial services, healthcare, tax and audit, and now aviation. Along the way I've learned that data leadership isn't really about the technology at all. It's about people, trust, and the discipline to keep asking "so what does this actually mean for the business" long aft...

 By Charles Mulwa Every few years, someone declares the data warehouse dead. I heard it when Hadoop showed up and everyone insisted schema-on-read would make schema-on-write obsolete. I heard it again when the data lake became the buzzword of the decade. Now it's the lakehouse, real-time streaming architectures, and a wave of AI-native platforms all taking their turn at the same obituary. And yet, twenty-plus years into a career built largely around data warehousing, database administration, and data strategy, I keep walking into organizations - across distribution, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, you name it - where the traditional data warehouse isn't just alive. It's still the thing doing the actual work. I want to be careful here, because I'm not writing this as a defense of stagnation. The tools around the warehouse have changed enormously, and for the better. But the core idea — a governed, modeled, trustworthy home for your organization's n...

By Charles Mulwa For more than twenty years, I've had the privilege of helping organizations solve one of their most valuable - and often most challenging- business assets: data. When I started my career, success was measured by keeping SQL Server databases online, optimizing queries, building data warehouses, and delivering reliable reports. Today, those skills remain essential, but the data landscape has evolved dramatically. Organizations are no longer asking, "Can we build a report?" They're asking: How do we prepare for Artificial Intelligence? Should we choose Databricks or Microsoft Fabric? Is Snowflake the right cloud data platform? How do we govern data across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud? Can Microsoft Purview help us understand our data estate? How do we build trusted data products that business users can consume confidently? The conversation has shifted from managing databases to managing data ecosystems. After more than two decades in enterprise data arch...