Leading Analytics Podcast

It's not often that I speak with an analytics leader from a company whose roots go back to America's founding fathers. Yatish Uchil of BNY Mellon joins me on this episode to discuss his new role leading an analytics team supporting the firm's shared services technology organization. Yatish shares some great anecdotes and soundbites he's developed over the years leading analytics, and compares his experience in both business-facing teams and now technology teams.

If you're into technology, pride yourself on owning the most cutting edge tech toys, you have undoubtedly spent time at Best Buy. And lurking in the background, and often driving the customer experience is growing data and analytics capability led by Nicole Nelson, the company's Chief Analytics Officer. You'll hear about the group's recent transition to a centralized model (COE), and a few nuggets from Nicole around makes for a high-performing analytics leader.

Zoetis may not be a recognizable brand to many, but If you work or live around animals or livestock, Zoetis will be a familiar name. Zoetis serves veterinarians, livestock producers and people who raise and care for farm and companion animals in more than 100 countries. Krishna Cheriath leads digital, data and analytics at Zoetis, and he walks us through how the company organizes the data and analytics effort around the globe and across business lines.

In this episode, Tarun Kataria of Mars takes us through his experience leading analytics efforts at a series of prominent global companies including Coca-Cola, Georgia Pacific and now Mars. You will walk away from this episode with a handful of very useful frameworks that Tarun uses with his team and company leaders to stay focused on the right things, and always drive the company's global mission across all of the business lines. Mars remains a private, family-owned company with a serious mission including climate change, food shortages, gender and racial equality, and other social issues. Behind the company's multiple priorities lies a very robust, highly intentional analytics capability that is a model for others to pay attention to.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud analytics and data tools, and Amazon the e-commerce giant continually ranks at the top of IIA's analytics maturity index. In this episode, I sit down with Rahul Pathak to talk about the evolution of AWS and the impact is has had (and will continue to have) on data science and analytics that are practiced and delivered at enterprises of all shapes and sizes around the world. You will hear quotes from Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos about the company's maniacal customer focus, and Rahul gives us a glimpse into the future of how cloud analytics will impact the the data science role going forward.

Scott Zoldi is the first CAO we spoken with on the podcast whose company's product is actually data and analytics. Today, FICO is a household name among consumers, but is also critical to the way enterprises of all sizes conduct business. Over 19 years at FICO, Scott has built a truly world-class data and analytics organization grounded in science and ethics. Yes, ethics. In our conversation, Scott shares the essentials of how analytics is organized at FICO, but also shares how important the proper and ethical use of the data they control is to the company.

Cameron Davies has been at Yum! Brands under a year, but seems to be building (and acquiring) world-class analytics capabilities the way he has at other companies, but in a way that is unique to Yum! If you don't recognize the Yum! Name, you'll surely recognize KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell which are all part of the Yum! Family of companies. In this far-reaching conversation, Cameron shares a unique list of attributes that make for a strong analytics leader, and he even references World War II history for inspiration when describing analytics projects. You'll also want to pay attention to how Cameron is applying lessons from his past to current challenges at Yum! Without question an inspiring episode.

We're kicking off Season 2 of the Leading Analytics Podcast with Bob Darin who holds both an chief analytics officer role and chief data officer role at CVS Health, which recently merged with the insurance giant Aetna. The combination of these two giant companies holds great promise in healthcare to bring together retail and pharmacy operations with health insurance services to produce a powerful end-to-end solution for patients and consumers. Bob shares a few selected approaches to how the data and analytics teams are organized, and specifically the expectations the organization has for the data and analytics capabilities. The bar is high for advanced technologies like AI at CVS/Aetna, and this episode walks you through the vision and tactics being employed step-by-step.

We end our first season with one of IIA's 2020 Excellence in Analytics (ANNY) winners, Cleveland Clinic. Chris Donovan joins me to describe the world-class team and capabilities they have assembled at Cleveland Clinic, but also to retrace for us this dreadful COVID year from a disease management and clinical perspective. Like John Phytilla in episode 7, Chris and his team could never have predicted (no pun intended), how central their team would become to the day-to-day operations as they took on COVID. But, the team, the data, and the models were up to the challenge, and will see it through to the very end