Driven by Data: The Podcast

In Episode 48 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Andy Moore, Chief Data Officer at Bentley Motors, where they discuss what it takes to define, build and execute a Data and Analytics strategy in a 100+ year old organisation, which includes;

• Understanding the corporate strategy
• Having a fully electric vehicle line-up by 2030
• The focus on sustainability
• The importance of executing a gap analysis of the corporate strategy
• Their Data Dojo Data Literacy programme
• The relationship between the strategy and the people
• Building and executing a Data Strategy from scratch in an 100+ year old organisation
• How data has evolved over the last 23 years in that organisation
• Setting the strategy and building the capability
• The challenges and opportunities of building a team from a blank canvass
• Balancing the team in relation to experience when hiring
• The demand from younger generations to get into our industry
• Using apprenticeships to develop the skills you'll need in the future
• Why workforce planning is critical
• How to increase the flow of fresh, young talent into our industry
• The benefits of having a truly diverse team like Bentley’s D&A team is
• Being a recovering Chief Digital Officer and what the future of the Chief Data Officer looks like

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In Episode 47 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Rachel Keane, Founder of DigData, where they discuss the need to connect the industry with education to raise the profile of Data & Analytics as a career option much earlier, which includes;

• What DigData is and why it exists
• The talent shortage in the D&A industry
• Why there is so little being done to raise awareness at an earlier age
• The need to attract students from different educational backgrounds and interests
• The consequences organisations are seeing and feeling
• The core challenges with how data is positioned within the education system
• What more can be done to raise the profile of our industry
• How can we quantify success
• What data "means" in educational institutions
• Why the tenure of the CDO plays a part
• How to make junior/graduate talent more accessible to all companies
• Why our obsession with tech is negatively impacting
• Connecting industry with education
• The relationship between this challenge and DEI

In Episode 46 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Ben Steele, Head of Data & Analytics at BMS Group where they discuss how to successfully engage your business leaders and what constitutes the perfect conditions for a Data Executive, which includes;

• Being the first data leader through the door
• Owning and implementing the first data strategy in an organisation
• Operating in low data maturity environments
• Generating between £50-100m in revenue through Data & Analytics
• Why it isn’t the job of a data team to define what value means for a business
• Why you can’t distil value down to one single meaning or metric
• Data use cases versus business use cases
• The importance of being comfortable having purely business conversations
• Why collaboration is the single biggest superpower of a Data & Analytics team
• What you should expect to be measured by as a Data Leader
• What business leaders, boards, shareholders, etc, view as “value”
• The importance of getting the balance of skills in a team correct
• Working effectively with other business leaders/peers
• How to successfully engage a business leadership team
• The importance of Data Literacy to the success of the CDO
• The perfect conditions for success in a CDO role
• Why talking about attribution of revenue is the wrong question
• Why the notion of a Data Strategy will hopefully become redundant

In Episode 45 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is rejoined by, Samir Sharma, CEO & Founder of Datazuum, where they discuss how to really understand business objectives and align a data strategy that you can operationalise, which includes;

• Defining, creating and operationalizing your data strategy
• The ‘Data Strategy Canvass’ and the purpose of existence
• The catalyst for creating it
• Why business teams and data teams are talking different languages
• The reasons why data strategies don’t often align with business strategies
• Why asking the right questions is the critical component
• How recent research has shown that only 6% of data strategies made any reference to business value generation
• The 3 questions to answer about every use case
• The difference between benefits and outcomes
• Why many organisations don’t have clearly defined business strategies
• How you can understand what the business objectives really are
• Why you don’t need to be at the decision-making table to aligning data strategy to business strategy  
• The 3 buckets that all value levers are tied to in the eyes of “the business”
• Why too many focus on data use cases and not business use cases
• The value discrepancy between business leaders and data teams
• Why most organisations don’t assess Data Leaders for the skills they actually need  
• Why reporting lines don’t matter
• The 7 steps to align a data strategy to business objectives

Link to Data Strategy Canvass: : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samirsharma1_data-valuecreation-business-activity-7101161956320907266-GlNT?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

In Episode 44 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Dan Kellet, Chief Data Officer at Capital One where they discuss how to strike the balance between driving innovation while delivering day-to-day, which includes;

• The benefits of working in one organisation for 23 years
• How a data and analytics journey evolves inside an organisation over that timeframe
• Why so many things are different but a lot of things are still the same
• What innovation means in a global organisation
• The relationship between innovation and value
• Quick Wins V Innovation
• The benefit of having a clearly defined business strategy
• Why innovation is all about people
• Why relationship building is one of the most important skills to success
• The impact a team structure has on realising value
• If team structures play a part in being able to innovate
• The benefits and challenges of a centralised versus fragmented team structure
• How to spend your time to strike the balance between delivery, innovation and value
• Advice on how to reprioritise with innovation in mind

In Episode 43 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, we’re sharing the conversation that Orbition Group’s very own Kyle Winterbottom and Catherine King took part in for the DAMA UK and BCS Diversity in Data Conference, hosted by Jenny Andrew, which includes;

• A snapshot of the Data & Analytics talent landscape today
• Current trends in Data & Analytics talent
• Encouraging more women into Senior Leadership
• How to create truly diverse teams  
• The importance of Non-STEM routes into Data
• The need to raise awareness at earlier ages
• Why we should be striving for diversity of thought
• How most organisations confuse DEI & representation
• The role of non-technical roles in diversity
• The importance of mentorship
• How to utilise events and external networking opportunities
• Battling Imposter Syndrome
• The impact job descriptions have on diversity
• What do companies mean by hybrid working in 2023
• Fixing a flawed hiring process

Video link to conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzmE9P-JD0s&t=18s

In Episode 42 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Scott Hirleman, CEO and Founder of Data Mesh Understanding and host of 'Data Mesh Radio' podcast where they discuss, the current Data Mesh landscape and how that's been impacted by Generative AI, which includes;

•  What Data Mesh is, and what it isn't
• The current state of play in the Data Mesh landscape
• What has worked in relation to extracting value from Data Mesh
• The organisations that have been very successful in implementing Data Mesh
• The common use cases that make it applicable
• If Data Mesh is right for your organisation, or not
• Why you would consider taking the Data Mesh route
• The impact of agility and speed
• The struggles of implementing at scale
• What to do and what not to do
• Why Data Mesh has been drowned out by Gen AI
• The relationship between Data Mesh and Gen AI
• Why the D&A industry is obsessed with chasing the "new shiny"
• How to prevent ourselves from doing so
• How to leverage our businesses' enthusiasm for the "new shiny"

In Episode 41 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Beth Bauer, Founder and CEO of PosiROI, where they discuss, the 4 key dimensions required to deliver innovation and value at scale, which includes;

• Why feedback loops are critical to driving innovation and a data-informed culture
• The importance of meeting people where they are
• Why value means different people to different people
• Why value always needs to translate to money eventually
• How the 1st steps of value creation are unlikely to be related to money
• Why we need to recognise there are different value points
• Why having the data culture that we want can create power struggles
•  The 4 dimensions that underpin the journey toward value creation
• Why Sales, Marketing and Speed define whether your innovation will be successful
• How innovation occurs in silos within the same organisations
• The ADEPT framework for strategies that assist with the acceleration of the 4 dimensions in a data-informed culture
• Why value of data needs to be measured against the number of use cases it can solve
• Why trust is the anchor to everything
• Why relationships will always win over data in building trust
• Building a high-performance team that creates value with data
• Why data is a team game and not just a data-team game
• To build a data-informed culture you need a sales and marketing capability

In Episode 40 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Deepak Jose, Global Senior Director, Head of One Demand Data Analytics Solutions at Mars Wrigley, where they discuss how to create a value-first mindset to break down organisational silo’s, which includes;

• Creating a single source of truth
• The ‘one-demand’ mindset
• How the concept of Ikigai led him to Mars
• How to understand, identify and prioritise business problems that add value
• Moving from reducing costs to creating profit and growth
• The importance of building relationships with functional leaders
• The 70, 20, 10 principle which dictates where investment and resource is directed
• Being “value-driven” despite the hype of being “data-driven”
• What constitutes value
• The concept of the 'balance scorecard' to create KPI’s that generate value
• The story of the Honduran Bridge and the relationship with Data Products
• White Box Building and Interoperability
• Investing in Change Management
• Why value-realisation is a team sport
• Why you need to build to adapt not build to last to break down silos
• Building a Gen AI Operating Model that drives a value-first approach
• The Gen AI Framework; do things, do things better and do better things
• The learnings of a 20+ year career of working at giants like Coca-Cola and Mars
• The importance of challenging the status quo
• Why you should be a Gazelle and not a Lion!

In Episode 39 of Season 3, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by, Allison Sagraves, Founding (former) Chief Data Officer at M&T Bank, and Board Advisor, where they discuss the role of the CDAO in the new era of AI and why they are set-up to fail, which includes;

• 91.9% of firms report that they have achieved some measurable value from their investments in data and analytics,
• 23.9% say they have created a data-driven organization
• 20.6% of firms report having established a data culture
• Between 2012 and 2023, companies having appointed a CDO grew from just 12.0% to 82.6%
• Only 35.5% of major companies report that the role is successful and well-established
• Just 40.5% say that the CDAO role is well understood within their company
• The three generations of CDO to CDAO and the pending CDAIO role
• The functional evolution of the CDAO role
• Why the goalposts keep moving for the CDAO
• The need for defined success metrics
• Why the Data & Analytics industry is always under construction
• Why we’re too glass half empty and there’s too much focus on what we’ve not achieved  
• The need to quantify what value is and communicate the value we’ve achieved
• The “build it and they will come” mentality
• How we no longer need to sell the simple concepts of data
• If you’re still having to convince people then you’ve got the wrong people in the company
• Whether reporting line impacts the effectiveness of the CDAO role
• The hardest thing for any CDAO to figure out is identifying what problem you actually need to solve
• What’s wrong with the CDAO role as of today
• What needs to happen to address those issues
• Moving into the AI era as a CDAO
• The skills needed to be a modern-day CDAO

Link tot he article discussed in the episode:

https://hbr.org/2023/06/why-chief-data-and-ai-officers-are-set-up-to-fail