The Business of Data Podcast

Download your copy of our latest research mentioned in this podcast here: Quantum Computing in Financial Services (coriniumintelligence.com) The speed of development of quantum technology is growing exponentially. And while the technology is in its infancy, it’s time for financial services firms to start paying attention to the opportunities and the risks it presents. In this conversation, Sergio Gago Huerta, Quantum Computing Lead at Moody’s Analytics discusses these issues considering a recent research report with 200 data analytics and innovation experts on how quantum research is already impacting the industry.

In this discussion:  

·        The evolution of quantum technology and where we are today

·        Key takeaways from our latest research on quantum computing in the financial services industry   

·        The near-term impacts of quantum computing

·        How financial services firms should be thinking about

In this week’s episode of the Business of Data podcast, Natwar Mall, the Chief Technology Officer at Fractal discusses the impact of ChatGPT on large enterprises and how he predicts it will transform the nature of data and analytics.

In this week’s episode of the Business of Data podcast, host April Stackhouse talks with Ann Hintzman, Chief Design Officer for Fractal. Together they discuss how companies can be successful in a data driven environment while still being mindful of the need for people centricity.

In the discussion this week:

· The correlation between data and design, and how this connects to human behavior

· How data leaders can lead the conversation to move forward with digital transformation while remaining open to the needs of the individual

· Ways for enterprise organizations to balance profit and environment

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Paul Lodge, Chief Data Officer for the Department for Work and Pensions. Together they discuss how data made an impact on some of the UK's biggest events in the last 10 years, including the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Brexit, and the covid-19 pandemic.

In the discussion this week:

• Connecting the dots between business and data
• Surveys and official statistics
• Moving quickly and effectively through times of stress and change
• Data security, privacy, and fraud

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Karine Serfaty, Chief Data Officer for British Newspaper, The Economist. Together they discuss what green-field opportunities Karine was able to exploit when she walked into her role in 2020, and how she's setting herself up for data cultural maturity.

In the discussion this week:

• The importance of strategic direction
• Mindset & growth
• Lessons learned
• Data as a mission-critical component
• Pros of not having a traditional  data background

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Mark Brady, Chief Data Officer for the US Space Force. Together they discuss strategy, impact, and AI.

In the discussion this week:

• Future applications of AI in the US Space Force
• Current definitions of AI
• The Data Strategy behind the US Space Force
• Data as a mission-critical component
• Cultural barriers

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Gurpreet Muctor, Chief Architect & Data Officer, Smart Cities for Westminster City Council. Together they discuss the benefits of creating and maintaining a flowing data ecosystem.

In the discussion this week:

• Strategic roadmaps to achieve goals
• Data capabilities surrounding internal requirements
• Public sector challenges of attracting talent
• Complex data sources
• Exploring opportunities for data, they won't all be winners

In this week’s episode of the Business of Data podcast, our host Catherine is joined by Jason Smith, Chief Digital Officer, Data and Commerce Groupe for French multinational advertising and public relations company Publicis Groupe. Together they walk through the challenges of Data & AI and the business' perception of what it means for them. 

In the discussion this week:

• AI and our internal bias
• Perfectionism is impossible
• Superiority complex and data

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Carolina Azar, Senior Director, Product Strategy at Moody’s Analytics. Together they discuss the benefits of assessing risk holistically to gain better insight into the vendor landscape, that in turn helps business leaders across the globe make better business decisions.

In the discussion this week:

● Business trends of current decision making

● Cultural mindset challenges

● Importance of trustworthy third-party data for supplier risk management

● Holistic risk assessments, including ESG metrics

● Market trends

Today’s podcast episode was made possible by our partnership with Moody’s!

Moody’s Analytics provides financial intelligence and analytical tools to help business leaders make better, faster decisions. Our deep risk expertise, expansive information resources, and innovative application of technology help our clients confidently navigate an evolving marketplace. We are known for our industry-leading and award-winning solutions, made up of research, data, software, and professional services, assembled to deliver a seamless customer experience. We create confidence in thousands of organizations worldwide, with our commitment to excellence, open mindset approach, and focus on meeting customer needs. For more information about Moody’s Analytics, visit our websiteor connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Moody's Analytics, Inc. is a subsidiary of Moody's Corporation (NYSE: MCO). Moody's Corporation reported revenue of $6.2 billion in 2021, employs over 14,000 people worldwide and maintains a presence in more than 40 countries.

For information on Moody’s Analytics Supply Chain Catalyst, click here

In this week’s episode of the Business of Data podcast, live at Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Nordics in Stockholm – our host Catherine is joined by Maija Hovila, Chief Analytics Officer for an engineering company, Kone. Together they walk through Maija’s journey into thought leadership and her experiences of getting data into the business.

In the discussion this week:

• Data literacy as a challenge and enabler
• Data Security and Privacy
• Talent Shortage
• Sneak peek into the CDAO Nordics event

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Steve Kleinmann, Industry Practice Lead, Master Data Solutions for financial intelligence and analytical tooling company, Moody’s Analytics. Together they walk through how organizations around the world are embracing third-party data to enrich their internal data and knowledge and grow their businesses.

In the discussion this week:

• Importance of augmenting decision-making with data
• The difference between data clarity and data chaos
• Compliance and risk activities, and how they can become enablers of growth
• Market trends

Today’s podcast episode was made possible by our partnership with Moody’s Analytics.
Moody’s Analytics Solutions for Third-Party Master Data
As organizations search for ways to optimize their data management strategies, master data management (MDM) rises to the top as an effective, secure, and scalable solution. Third-party master data, when used in conjunction with an enterprise MDM system, enables an organization to control its data and unlock numerous financial and productivity growth opportunities. Moody’s Analytics provides master data, including firmographics, company size metrics, and corporate hierarchies. With industry-leading coverage of over 448 million entities across a broad range of entity types, our pre-mastered data is available via a wide range of applications, APIs and proprietary connectors to ensure seamless delivery to virtually any third-party or in-house data management system.
For more information, click here.

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Jay Como, Chief Financial Data Officer for the biggest bank in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Bank! Together they walk through where the CDO should sit in relation to the business, and what the implications are.

In the discussion this week:

• Senior Data Leadership
• Data Culture
• Understanding the Business needs
• Data trust

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Murtz Daud, Chief Data Officer for a large independent charity, St Andrew's Healthcare. Together they walk through the future aspirations of predictive data solutions, and the challenges of cultural pushback to data-driven decisions.

In the discussion this week:

• Augmented decision making
• Predictive data solutions
• Self-service adoption
• People & Culture

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Loretta Franks, VP & CDAO for American multinational food manufacturing company, Kellogg. Together they walk through the challenges and benefits of storytelling, business value, and collaboration.

In the discussion this week:

• Communicating complex information to the business
• Blurring the lines between the business and data
• Unlocking the joint value creation
• The impact of seeing yourself as a 'business' leader, not just a data leader
• The creation of a data academy
• Getting more people into STEM

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Chris Parmer, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of software company, Plotly. Together they walk through the challenges and benefits of empowering data scientists with data visualization and data apps.

In the discussion this week:

• Communicating complex information to the business
• Role development for data scientists, enabling data scientists to publish and share their work
• How visualization is going to shape data adoption in the market
• The benefit of interactive data apps as a technology

Today’s podcast episode was made possible by our partnership with Plotly!
Plotly is a software company whose mission is to enable every company to build data apps. Their product, Dash Enterprise, is a platform of best-in-class development tools to quickly and easily analyze and visualize data with Python from virtually any data source. With customers across the Fortune 500, Plotly is a category-defining leader in enabling data-driven decisions from advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. For more information, visit Plotly here.

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Avinash Tripathi, Vice President of Analytics - Marketing Analytics and Marketing Sciences, University of Phoenix. Together they walk through the challenges and benefits of approaching analytics as a profit and revenue-generating opportunity, rather than a cost center.

In the discussion this week:

• Making analytics simple
• Practical tips on approaching business problems with analytical solutions
• Accessibility
• Profit generation as a mindset

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, live at Chief Data & Analytics Officers, Fall in Boston - our host Catherine is joined by Victoria Gamerman, Global Head of Data Governance and Insights, for one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, Boehringer Ingelheim. Together they walk through Victoria's journey into thought leadership, and her advice on networking, mentoring, and getting your name out there.

In the discussion this week:

• How to become a trusted source
• Networking top tips; virtual and in-person
• Helping mentor future talent
• Behind the scenes of the first-ever North American Business of Data Awards!

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Suresh Martha, Head of Data-Driven Innovation & Analytics for the healthcare business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, EMD Serono Inc. Together they walk through the challenges and benefits of third party data, and how it can add in market context which allows you to stay competitive.

In the discussion this week:

• Data quality challenges of third-party data
• Ethics and access to third-party data
• Thinking outside the box of traditional datasets
• Marketing intelligence benefits

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Dora Boussias, Senior Director, Data Strategy & Architecture for American multinational medical technologies corporation Stryker. Together they walk through the process of streamlining operations to make data & analytics simple and effective.

In the discussion this week:

• Enabling data access ease
• Understanding data's journey through the business
• How to simplify processes
• What it takes to have an end-to-end view of data
• What it takes to re-train the current business habits

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Bobbi Jo Allan, Vice President, NF Digital Product Management and Innovation for  Fortune 100 company Nationwide. Together they walk through the importance of placing your customer at the center of your thinking, and how you can impact the bigger business picture.

In the discussion this week:

• Hybrid models of innovation
• Understanding your customer's thinking with data
• Retaining top talent
• How industry-specific knowledge can really empower a data team

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Munyaradzi Nyikavaranda, Group Executive Head: Digital Analytics & Marketing Technology from South African Media company, MultiChoice Group. Together they walk the complexities of human nature, and how behavioral science can provide quantitative answers to business questions.

In the discussion this week:

• The quantitative data behavioral science can provide
• The risk element to influencing customers' behavior
• Challenges of a value-driven mindset
• Successful examples of behavioral science making a difference

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Daniel Cox, VP of Data Visualization and Insights for British multinational universal bank, Barclays. Together they walk through Dan's career journey from baker to data, and some of his key learnings when it comes to creating meaningful data visualization and insights.

In the discussion this week:

• What it's like to come into the world of data with a non-technical background
• The impact visualization can make internally
• Cultural challenges of being "data-driven"
• Successful use-cases for data insights

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Steven Totman, Chief Strategy Officer, for data privacy software company, Privitar. Together they walk through some of Steve's horror stories of ethics gone wrong, and what leaders should be considered in the world of data & analytics ethics.

In the discussion this week:

• Data quality & its impact on the success of data projects & products
• The impact of an agile approach
• Cultural expectations of location
• Data breaches and their impact
• Data Policies

This episode was brought to you in collaboration with Privitar!

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King joins Sean MacCarthy, VP of Analytics for Good Sam & Camping World on stage at CDAO Chicago 2022 to talk about data in reality

In the discussion this week:

• Hiring from different backgrounds to create a successful team
• Creating an environment to grow talent
• What it takes to deploy the latest trends
• The biggest challenges standing in the way of data quality

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Kulani Likotsi, Head of Data Management and Data Governance for a major South African Bank, about ensuring data privacy and security are at the heart of data processes.

In the discussion this week:

• Collaboration with Data Security, Information Security, Fraud, and Audit
• The power of creating a "center of excellence"
• Governing data with the aim to generate business value
• Breaking down entrenched silos
• Working through the challenges of data breaches; understanding the processes in place

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Eugene Ras, Head of Data & Analytics, for multinational brewing and beverage company, Distell, about ensuring holistic data & analytics strategic alignment.

In the discussion this week:

• How to handle the curve balls of business
• Using strategic alignment as the catalyst for prioritization of projects and products
• How historic information impacts future strategy, post-pandemic
• Influencing each business unit
• Real-time alignment
• Data & Analytics Culture, and handling demand management

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Aaron Wilkerson, Manager, Data Management, for child care and early childhood education company, Learning Care Group about how the data management team has been working to enable the business to have greater access to data & insights.

In the discussion this week:

• Getting data in the hands of teachers and business end-users
• The power of making backend sources agnostic
• How to keep key stakeholders aligned
• Business value should be the north star of every data team
• Prioritizing data projects
• Blending legacy systems with new structures

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Nikki Miles, Head of Data & Analytics for used photo & video equipment digital marketplace, MPB about the scaling up and investment required to ensure the continuation of business growth.

In the discussion this week:

• The investment required in technology and solutions to enable scalability
• Desires the 360-degree view of the customer
• Data visualization and making the data accessible to the business
• Single source of truth

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Juan Vitantonio, Director of Business Insights & Analytics Lead - Finance on the Cloud for British multinational banking and financial services organization HSBC talks with Business of Data podcast host Catherine King about his top trends in business intelligence, analytics, and data consumption

In the discussion this week:

• The blend of technology and business as a method to deal with the challenge of adoption
• How tools and solutions can support the end-to-end view
• Vitantonio's take on cultural push-back of data-driven processes and ambitions
• How being interactive with dashboards & data exploration tools can help maintain success
• HSBC's journey to the cloud

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Audrey Limery CEO & Founder of analytics platform Kweevo about her journey into data and analytics, how racist and sexist experiences negatively impacted aspects of her confidence and professional development, and how she addressed these challenges and harnessed her passion for the industry to create something innovative.

In the discussion this week:

• Audrey Limery's journey into the data and analytics industry her early experiences with racism and xenophobia in France and the UK
• How micro-aggressions and unequal treatment in the workplace combine to create a toxic work environment for many people of color
• Limery's motivation and journey for creating her own start-up and the challenges she's faced along the way
• How Limery embraced doing what she loves to empower herself to create something innovative in the data and analytics space
• Advice for the next generation of Black leaders in data and analytics

In this week's episode of the Business of Data podcast, host Catherine King talks with Founder and Managing Director of data quality consultancy The Classification Guru about her personal journey into the data and analytics industry, and how she found her calling as a 'fixer of dirty data'.

In the discussion this week:

• The importance of fun in data culture
• Walsh's personal journey into the data and analytics industry
• The dangers of 'dirty data' and how to avoid them

In this week’s Business of Data podcast, Qlik EVP Global Partnerships and Chief of Staff to the CEO Poornima Ramaswamy speaks to us about data’s evolution from a back-office function to a front office enabler. With over twenty years of data analytics experience Ramaswamy has seen first-hand that although data has always been a key business priority, the challenge lies in putting it at the center of operations.

“CEOs understand the importance of harnessing data and what that can do for a business. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they understand how to get to the end goal where data is a core part of their business strategy. They still lean on technology teams to help them navigate this,” she says. “But that is the first opportunity for CEOs to actually understand what it means to be data-driven.

“Many times, there’s a disconnect between organizational data goals and reality. The aspiration to become data-driven and to improve customer experience is there but the level of investment and effort doesn’t match the aspirations.”

In Ramaswamy’s view, that discord between data aspirations and becoming a data-driven organization is where CIOs and CDOs step in. Data leaders will help business leaders understand what that data journey should look like and move it from driving strategic decisions to operational ones.

“Data teams should look beyond one- or two-year targets and base decisions on data,” she says. “Many of our customers are successfully getting executive buy-in and transforming the entire organization, up and down the value chain.

“We’ve got a few customers in retail and electronics and through COVID-19’s early stages, they recognized the importance of acting on real-time events. So, it’s less about a short-term strategy and more about keeping stores open and helping employees manage KPIs, stock levels and supply chain bottlenecks, for example.

“As the pandemic moves into being endemic, and as other international events pop up such as the California wildfires and the looming gas shortages, customers want to respond to events based on real-time data and not just at a strategic level, but right down to the factory level.”

• CEOs embrace data’s role but don’t know how to operationalize it. As a back-office function, helping drive strategic business decisions
• CIOs and CDOs are stepping up to the plate. Data leaders are helping organizations fulfill their data strategies by mapping out the journey
• Look beyond data short-term goals. A data strategy should consider how to keep the business running in times of uncertainty

In this week’s Business of Data podcast, Legal & General Capital’s Head of Data Adebayosoye Awonaike, talks about his experiences leading this transformation, and the challenges faced along the way. The company’s data strategy requires readily available and usable data throughout the organization. 

He says: “We needed to centralize data, that’s really driven our conversations over the last few months because we had to shop across a range of suppliers. Ultimately, we decided we were going cloud because that’s just what would work for the business.” 

As cloud adoption continues across organizations and industries, finding the right solutions provider needs the transformation leader to be aware of their business’s unique needs. 

One of Awonaike’s initial challenges was in finding the best cloud partner to undertake the journey with. He based the decision on the alignment between Legal & General’s strategic direction and the vendor’s own roadmap and ambitions. Next, he focused on developing his team’s skills to maximize the benefit of the initiative. 

“It was really about building a team to deliver this solution, a team with a wide range of skills, from solutions architects to testers,” Awonaike says.  

He also cultivates his team's storytelling abilities to increase cross-functional engagement.  

“While a business product owner could reach out to just the scrum master, I would rather have the data engineer tell the story through his demo than for him to just do the technical bit,” he continues. 

Even with the cloud solution in place, data leaders still have to prove value in their investment. Awonaike finds that regular scrum sessions between his team and the rest of the organization ensure the transformation unfolds in line with evolving business needs.  

Awonaike explains: “Business requirements can be volatile. You can’t hear the requirements once and never check back in with business. You need to keep the engagement going, so we have two-week sprints that basically let us fail very quickly then get things right.” 

“No business leader wants to throw away money. So, the question is what value are you adding? If you're able to paint the picture of what value is, whether it’s tangible, in terms of revenue or intangible, there has to be a value the business can connect with.” he concludes. 

• Finding the right cloud provider. The ideal solutions provider has to meet your business's unique set of needs 

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In this week’s Business of Data podcast, he shares his approach to doing this in a way that balances working towards an organization’s long-term strategy with meeting its short-term, tactical goals.

“I’ve been guilty of taking on more work than my team and I could handle in the past,” Williams explains. “You take it on without realizing that little thought has gone into what you actually need to do to achieve something. And before you know it, your scope explodes, and you can't deliver.”

Williams says his approach helps to deal with what he calls ‘wild card’ projects. These are unexpected projects that must be prioritized and can only be delivered by either supplanting the team’s current workload or bringing in more resources.

Since data team resources are finite, Williams recommends managing them by dividing the team’s work between providing ongoing operational and strategic support for the business and research and innovation.

He argues that the ability to weigh all potential projects according to a common scale is also vital. Creating a universal template for evaluating potential analytics projects both helps company stakeholders understand the data team’s workload and creates a fair system for deciding which projects to deliver first.

“A common assessment template gives everybody a chance to pitch for the team's scarce resources,” he explains.

An effective project evaluation template should ask questions such as: Will the project generate revenue? Is it cost-efficient? Will it save time? Does it serve an environmental purpose? This will help company stakeholders to agree on which projects should move forwards and which are less likely to drive business impact.

• Anticipate ‘wild cards’. Data leaders must allocate team resources to strike the right balance between delivering long-term strategic projects, providing short-term tactical support to business units and working on ad hoc ‘wild card’ initiatives
• Use a common scale to weigh projects. As more projects come in, it will be harder to prioritize them. All work should be considered on the same merits
• Define what success will look like. Data and analytics project proposals should include defined outcomes that both demonstrate the value they will bring to the business and enable comparison with other projects in the pipeline

Data leadership is evolving constantly. But with Harvard Business Review reporting that the average Chief Data Officer’s tenure is just 2.5 years, it’s clear that many of the executives who hold these positions aren’t meeting expectations in these notoriously demanding roles.  

As Sarah Gadd, Head of Data and AI Solutions at investment banking giant Credit Suisse, says, the breadth of skills required to lead data-driven business transformations means it takes a very specific type of leader to thrive as a CDAO.

“What strikes me is that it’s almost like looking for the unicorn,” she says. “Maybe that’s why we’re so short-lived.”

This week on the Business of Data podcast, Gadd and Aleksandar Lazarevic PhD, VP of Advanced Analytics and Data Engineering at tools manufacturer Stanley Black & Decker, share their views about what it means to be a successful CDAO in 2022.

The responsibilities of a CDAO will vary depending on the type of company they work in. As Dr Lazarevic says, how an organization has used data historically will impact what kind of leader it needs.

Companies that have data and analytics in their DNA, such as Google, Amazon or Meta, are at the most mature end of the spectrum. Their data-driven business cultures mean that their data leaders can act as strategic advisors to other company executives.

Dr Lazarevic explains: “[The] role of the CDAO is not necessarily someone to lead a single organization and lead all the efforts across the whole company, but rather someone who is accountable for strategic initiatives where the company should invest in data, AI [or] machine learning.”

Companies in sectors such as financial services sit in the middle of the data maturity spectrum. They are used to using and storing data, but generally only as a by-product of other business processes. Data leaders in these companies need to promote awareness of data-driven ways of working and a culture of adopting them.

Finally, there is everyone else. While most enterprises aspire to becoming data-driven, many start their journeys with very low-quality data and a poor understanding of how to store and use it. Data leaders in these companies must start with the basics and hope to pivot their attention to digital transformation once they’ve laid the right foundations.

“Typically, in these companies, they don’t have data culture,” Dr Lazarevic says. “[The CDAO role is] much, much broader, and I think that’s why many companies fail to define [it well].”

In 2022, a growing number of enterprises are looking to move beyond the initial phases of their data and analytics strategies to drive enterprise-wide business transformations. In these companies, data leadership roles are transitioning from technology-focused positions to ones that are business-facing and involved in steeri

Enterprises that successfully leverage data and analytics have been found to outperform their competitors. But as companies undertake these transformation journeys, their data functions must also evolve to keep up with the demands of a data-driven business.

In this week’s Business of Data podcast, Natasha Gray, VP, Head of Data Analytics for HIV/AIDS researcher and pharmaceutical company ViiV Healthcare, shares how she’s spearheading the firm’s analytics capability modernization.

“The driver behind all this is to make sure that we're getting more medicines to the patients who need them,” she says. “This means looking at opportunities to leverage AI and machine learning to optimize the business and bring about new chances for collaboration.”

"The other thing might be a bit basic,” she adds. “But it’s ensuring that our reporting and our performance is clear and accessible to all. So, democratizing data, making sure that we're having the right conversations.”

Naturally, successful data projects in one department can lead to increased demand for data insights across the organization, stretching the data team’s resources. Gray faces the same challenge as many data leaders – balancing organizational demand with her team’s capacity. That’s why she says it’s important to make the most of co-workers outside the team with a passion for data.

Gray says: “One of the things we’re thinking about is the need for more manpower. You could say my team is the center of excellence. But there’s also an opportunity to develop the talent elsewhere in the organization.”

“If we try to hold too much centrally, we’ll become kind of bogged down, and I think that will stop us innovating,” she continues. “We have many great people within the business who have data- and analytics-related roles. In my view, that's a key to our success. If you don't have those people who are trained and can take on some of the work and drive the strategy locally, the transformation would stall eventually.”

• Democratize data across the enterprise. Data democratization encourages inter-functional collaboration and shows value in data and analytics
• Plan for increased demand for data. As demand for data-driven insights grows in an enterprise, data team efficiency becomes critically important
• Make the most of data champions. Where resources are limited, developing data champions within different departments can drive the data strategy locally

In this week’s Business of Data podcast, Milton Volpato, Liberty Mutual Insurance’s East and West Markets Modeling Data Solutions Manager, advises data leaders on dealing with this kind of resistance. For Volpato, the route cause is often the result of people’s fears around change.

“The key things I see as barriers are the fears of the unknown and the loss of control,” he notes. “Imagine a person who knows everything about a certain system and now they have to relearn a new one. They might not feel like a specialist anymore. You can deal with these by building trust between the leader and employees.”

According to a recent NewVantage Partners survey of data leaders, more than 90% of executives cite culture as the biggest hindrance to data transformation. As a result, organizations are increasingly expecting leaders to be skilled change managers.

For Volpato, this means gaining co-worker trust by demonstrating that new technology will support staff in their roles, rather than replace them. It also requires leaders who can empathize with those affected by change and implement processes for including business stakeholders in the planning stages of data-driven initiatives, so they can help to inform and guide these projects.

Volpato explains: “If you’re changing a system, it's really important to involve the affected people in the pre-sales process, so they don’t feel as if it’s being forced on them. It’s a big issue in the data solutions space – the people buying the solution probably won’t be using it! I think those working on the deployment need to work closely with those receiving the solution.”

“There’s a huge difference between cloud or analytics pre-sales, real-life deployments and the problems those deployments come with,” he concludes. “You could have the best tool, but you need to engage your people through the adoption. You need to show value and you can do this through some quick wins (small projects to gain trust).”

• Plan for resistance to change. It’s natural for staff to be nervous about changing how they way, and it’s up to data leaders to allay those fears
• Demonstrate value to build trust. Delivering ‘quick wins’ and communicating when incremental milestones are reached can help to show the value of data-driven tools and initiatives
• Involve end-users from the outset. Data leaders must partner closely with business stakeholders to co-create data and analytics solutions and ensure they meet business needs successfully