Episode Title : Navigating a CDO role across geographies, organizations and cultures

Episode Summary: Althea Davis served as a Chief Data Officer (CDO) across at least 5 different organizations and multiple cultures. After shuttling between Canada and the United States, Althea studied in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship. From there, she settled down in the Netherlands for 30 years or so climbing up the ranks to become a CDO at multiple organizations. Interestingly, Althea served the CDO role not as an employee but as an external consultant. The episode covers Althea’s opinions on the role of CDO and her experience across multiple geographies and cultures.

04:20: In emerging countries, the governments have an outsized influence in certain regions with respect to digital transformation.

07:00: The top down approach in Gulf Council countries (GCC) does work. Almost all countries in GCC have bold and visionary plans and they do get things done by working top down.

09:40: Telehealth is an example of a digital transformation driven by local needs. Diabetes in the Gulf and in UAE is a real problem given local diets. So the investments in telehealth are expanding rapidly because of the need to address diabetes and other local social challenges.

11:19 (HEADLINER): The predictive models that are being built for telehealth need access to locally sourced metadata and catalogs. And the need to put the insights into knowledge graphs.

13:08 (HEADLINER): With large real estate projects in the middle east and an intent to make these ‘smart’ projects, there is a need for tremendous amounts of investments in data curation and transformation.

17:05: Abu Dhabi is one of the safest cities in the world and the police force use lot of digitization and AI with the use of data to keep it safe.

19:53: State of data literacy is not as mature as ambition. To be fair to the gulf region, the focus on data is relatively recent but they are catching up fast.

24:37: Althea is part of the International society of chief data officers and also a ‘data’ ambassador of the UAE. Yes, there is a lot of room for improvement in data literacy and ALthea thinks she can get there.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Podcast website: https://DataTransformersPodcast.Com

Althea Davis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/althea-davis-1005357/

Data Transformers Podcast

Join Peggy and Ramesh as they explore the exciting world of Data Management, Data Analytics, Data Governance, Data Privacy, Data Security, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Internet Of Things.