LEAD WITH DATA Podcast

Janice is an analytics leader with a strong commercial acumen gained from a 20 year career spanning analytics, business process improvement, strategy, internal audit and consulting. She is passionate about using data to drive informed decision making and has a proven track record in mentoring and developing successful teams.

In her last role, Janice transformed her organisations approach to data analytics by introducing a cloud-based enterprise data lake and data visualisation tools which is what we dive into for this episode. She has held prior roles as GM of Revenue Assurance at Telstra, and has led large-scale data analytics programs of work and internal audit/consulting roles for both Ernst & Young and Arthur Anderson. Janice also recently completed a three-year board term for Retina Australia Victoria, a not-for-profit that funds research into curing blindness.

In this episode we talk about how to make Data a useful and usable part of everyone’s job!  I am joined by Kshira Saagar is the Chief Data Officer (CDO) of Latitude Financial Services.

Latitude is Australia’s biggest non-bank lender, digital payments, and finance company with over 2.7 million customers across Australia and New Zealand. At Latitude, Kshira is currently working on enabling the enterprise to make faster and smarter data-driven decisions and oversees all the data science processes and infrastructure from data collection and governance to algorithmic decision tools development.

He has been consecutively recognised among the Top 10 Analytics Leaders in Australia, for 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Before Latitude, Kshira had performed in different senior and leadership data roles at Global Fashion Group, Equifax, Fairfax Media, and Mu Sigma Inc. He has over a decade of experience in data science solution development and analytics problem-solving for retail, telecom and insurance markets, including fortune 100 clients. He also has professional data analytics experience in media, healthcare, aviation, logistics, and FMCG industries.

Kshira strongly believes that every organisation can become truly data-driven. At every place he has worked, working and will work - he likes to go back to the fundamentals, asking people to ask more questions of data and being a tough taskmaster on getting actionable outcomes from data, on all possible occasions. Outside work, Kshira spends a lot of time on advancing data literacy initiatives for high school and undergrad students.

We cover if being fully digital make companies more data driven, how organisations can build and support self service capabilities, tips and strategies for increasing data literacy and the approach and framework for analytics capability for new products.

In this episode of Lead with Data, I had the pleasure of speaking to Bhavika Unadkat, who is the Head of Data Governance at Energy Australia.

Enjoying a successful career to date, Bhavika is an impressive and knowledgeable Data leader and shares her journey and how Change Management is a key driver to enable the delivery of a successful Data strategy.

We discuss:

• How she migrated to Australia and ended up in Data?  
• Her experience of when, as an intern, she was given the responsibility of playing a key role in delivering and driving BI Change in the organisation.
• How she has enabled Data driven change in more than five organisations, with one of her most recent Data Migrations and reboot of Data strategies at Momentum Energy. Bhavika is an extremely humble individual, with a positive energy and someone who demonstrates what can be achieved if there is something you are really passionate about.

A real inspiration! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

On this very first episode of Lead with Data, I was joined by Paul Hunt, who is the Senior Manager Business Intelligence (APAC) for Club Assist. 

A consummate data professional, Paul has over 13 years’ continuous Business Intelligence and Data Strategy experience and has implemented multiple highly-complex data strategies, delivering solutions for over 2000 users. 

He shared his experiences from On Prem to Cloud “Nine”.  Going from On-Prem to a fully cloud solution is a journey that many companies have either embarked on, completed or are considering. 

With a vision to deliver better insights and enable business growth, Paul led the Cloud Data journey for Club Assist (APAC). 

In this episode he shared: 

• Is Cloud better then On Prem?
• How to get started? Where do you begin?
• Which Cloud solution should I use?
• The strategy and the architecture
• Hybrid Cloud and On Prem mix
• Why getting the right people is important?
• What are the things to watch out for when embarking on this digital transformation?

He is an extremely knowledgeable data professional, so it’s an episode you don’t want to miss!