Truth Be Known

This episode features an interview with Dr. Kelly Hereid, Director of Catastrophe R&D at Liberty Mutual Insurance in the Corporate Enterprise Risk Management Group. Prior to Liberty Mutual, Kelly was a research scientist at Chubb in their primary side natural catastrophe unit. She has a Ph.D. in geological sciences from the University of Texas – Austin, focusing on climate science. On this episode, Kelly talks about using historical data to create catastrophe models, taking a strategic standpoint to invest in resiliency, and reducing vulnerability to changing hazards.

Quotes

*”There is a huge need in the financial sector to try and capture [climate] risk. Which means there's a lot of information that's available, but you also have to be able to sift through what's there and interpret it appropriately to make sure that you're not just ending up with perhaps nonsense just because the data is available does not necessarily mean that it's data that you can use.”

*”If I have someone who's trying to say that they have a model that will tell me down to the cent what your hurricane losses will be in 2050, I would want to have some questions about that because I know that the scientific confidence in changes in hurricane frequency is comparatively low. We operate in a field that includes a lot of data, but also includes a lot of uncertainty. So we need to be really comfortable operating in a space of uncertain and developing science.”

*The Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, at the time, the most expensive and destructive California wildfire in history in the past has almost exactly the same footprint as another fire called the Hanly Fire that happened in the 1960s. Literally exactly almost identical. The only difference is nobody knows about the fire in the sixties, because at that time there was no one living in the area. So it's that it's a change in hazard, but some of these are areas that have always burned, but now there are people there who are at risk.”

*”Catastrophe models allow us to look at historical events in the context of where people live today. So you might run, say, a historical wildfire footprint, but run it with where people are actually living today. So you can be able to see those changes that are driven by exposure, by people moving to different areas. On my team, we also do things like stress tests, where we take the model as it stands. And we can do ‘what if’ experiments, because each one of these events in the model has some characteristics of the event; how big it is, severity, spread, but it also has an assumed frequency. So we can say what would happen if you doubled the frequency of this particular characteristic of event, or tripled it? What kind of impact could that potentially have to sort of our overall book of business, our overall loss potential and damage potential from wildfires? So as a tool, we don't just use it at face value. We can use it as a place to drop, to run and drive experiments that can allow us to explore future climates when we don't necessarily know what that percent change is going to be.” 

*”You can do amazing research and come up with really interesting conclusions. But if you don't have any way to tie it to the needs of your audience, the needs of your end user, it may as well have not have happened.”

*”We can't prevent disasters from perhaps we can, we can't prevent hazards from happening, but we do have the opportunity as a society to prevent more disasters. Because disaster is an intersection between hazard and a community.”

Time Stamps

[2:03] The path to becoming Director of Catastrophe Research and Development

[3:44] What are catastrophe models?

[12:44] Studying wildfires and why they have become more hazardous

[19:59] How to change your risk profile

[20:57] How updated building codes can affect your business resiliency

[28:12] The role of the modeling team

[32:51] Data integrity and challenges in modeling hazards

Links

Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn

Follow Kelly on Twitter

Check out Liberty Mutual Insurance

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

Follow Rob on Twitter

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com

This episode features an interview with Tom Edwards, Chief Digital and Data Officer at Omnicom Health Group, the largest healthcare marketing and communications network in the world. Prior to Omnicom, Tom served as Chief Digital and Innovation Officer at Epsilon. Tom has been named one of the Top 50 Most Influential Business Leaders in Technology and a Top 10 Global Marketer Award winner by OnCon this year. On this episode, Tom talks about transparency in decision making, how to organize massive amounts of data in order to derive insights, and how to determine the ideal communication strategy for a target audience.

Quotes

*“You want to connect the vision coming from the top to how that's practically going to be rolled out across those different entities, and connecting the expediter to the vision and pulling that completely through. And then going and driving towards quick wins. Like that ultimately is the core driver of adoption. People have to see it in action. What is it actually doing for the business? How can this help me be faster to market, you know, ahead of my competition.”

*“Communication is key. Making it easy and consumable is probably the other. There tends to be this stigma with data, digital and technology that it's complicated. And in a lot of ways, it is. But one of the core things that you have to do to be able to truly drive adoption across a large organization and transform it as you have to make it consumable. You have your subject matter experts who can go incredibly deep, understand the vernacular and the terminology, understand everything about taxonomy and data hygiene and all the things you need to do. But at the end of the day, if it's not understandable across the various functions within the organization from account to creative disservice or strategy, then it's not going to drive any comprehensive value.”

*“Especially when we're going into new areas and new areas of expertise, I’ve learned not to just trust at face value when someone says they can do something. I need to verify the level of competency upfront before we engage on a major initiative and make sure there is a proven track record providing the type of solution we’re looking for.”

Time Stamps

*[3:38] Merging Digital and Data

*[5:10] Making the most out of data assets

*[6:38] How to strategically enable agencies

*[8:03] Predictive decisioning and the cookieless future

*[9:30] Making massive data sets actionable

*[11:47] Omnicom’s data architecture and tech stack

*[15:27] Creating common language across the organization

*[20:13] Looking to partner with leaders in data-driven organizations

*[23:14] Preparing for a shifting data landscape

*[26:24] The importance of transparency as a leader

*[29:23] Finding a mentor and sponsor

Links

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn

Follow Tom on Twitter

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

Follow Rob on Twitter

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com

This episode features an interview with Asha Saxena, Founder and CEO of Women Leaders in Data and AI. sha has 25 years of experience building successful tech businesses. She also serves as a CEO Coach working with women in tech, and she’s an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, teaching enterprise strategy and data strategy. In this episode, Asha talks about how empowering women in tech means including male allies, investing in a simple user experience for improved adoption rates, and how to earn trust in data.

Quotes

*”My son asked, ‘Mom, you seem to be doing these multiple things. Where do you really truly get the satisfaction? Why don't you do something or build something for people like you?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Women in tech or women in data. Have you done anything for that?’ And [at] first I got offended and I was like, ‘What do you mean women? Are you putting me in a box? I'm a professional.’ All my life, I worked really hard for my worth. And I don't think my worth should be just boxed by my gender. [But] it's not about boxing, it's more [about] owning it. You can own that you're a woman in tech and there’re not too many women. And women have challenges because they don't have enough role models on the top." 

*”You must have heard about the financial services companies who did this experiment. An algorithm for the high positions - the C-level positions - rejected women’s resumes because the data didn't show that there were enough women [who] could succeed in that position. Because there [were] no women hired in the past. So we don't have enough data, we don't have diverse data, and we don't have women on the top who can help create that change. So what do you do about that?”

*“What happens to the women who are on the top and don't have role models? What happens to women who are VP level or C level who don't have [a] peer group? And what happens to the environment? Is the environment ready? I tell you within our organization, I see so many women who are leaving their organization because they get on the top and they realize that the top is not ready for them.”

Time Stamps

*[4:59] How algorithms become sexist

*[7:04] How to support women in positions of power

*[12:41] Why support from men is important

*[16:28] Facilitating change through simple steps

*[19:32] Building trust in data

*[25:50] Tips to develop a data strategy

*[28:49] Supporting engineers in developing a data strategy

*[35:12] How Asha Saxena uses data to make difficult decisions

*[38:46] Advice for data leaders

Links

Connect with Asha on LinkedIn

Follow Asha on Twitter

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

Follow Rob on Twitter

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com

This episode features an interview with KJ Gupte, Data Science Lead at Tradeshift, a cloud-based platform for supply chain payments. KJ has had nearly 15 years of experience in the industry. Before Tradeshift, KJ served as Data Analytics Manager at PwC where she led a team of engineers and developers in making data-centric products for customers like Apple, Google, and HP. She is also a graduate of the Harvard Business Analytics Program, and says her experience in the Data Science Pipeline and Critical Thinking course felt like rewiring her brain to think about data in new ways. In this episode, KJ discusses translating technical data for her stakeholders, building credibility in data among the C-suite, and being a trailblazer in the supply chain economy.

Quotes

*“I think what has helped me drive success is being extremely collaborative with the team and extremely transparent. Because many times when you are transparent and you exchange your thoughts, that's where you get the most gains. So I might be thinking about data from an angle and the users might be thinking about it from a very different angle. And a lot of exchange needs to happen. Because not everybody looks at the data in the same way. Everybody comes with a very different skill set, whether you are an engineer, whether you are a data scientist, whether you are a CEO, CFO, everybody has a core skillset that they bring to the table. It's not always the same or uniform. So collaboration and transparency is always the key.”

*“We are absolutely data-driven right now. I'm very glad I was hired at the point that I was, because that's when we were scaling up. And that's when we were sitting on like chunks of data that was so potent that it was just a matter of using it. And in fact, we are sitting on buyer and seller supply chain data, which is the core of the supply chain disruptions that are going on. So we are in so many ways trail blazers to the whole supply chain economy.”

*“The leadership knew that there was a lot of work that needed to be done in data. So my core job was to actually convey that message. Initially I spent a lot of time giving presentations on just what we had, not going into complexities. But, um, presentations around, okay, this is what we have. This is the story that data is telling. And just making people curious, you know, making people interested about data. Because if, if your data is not telling a story, it is just numbers.”

*”When it comes to data, things are needed as of yesterday. And the moment you get data, it is stale. You have data right now, but it has gone light years ahead. So you have to be extremely fast and evolve with the data. So that was definitely a challenge, but what helped me is I had a lot of visibility. Right from the time I was hired, I was directly working with leadership. I was working with engineering to see the lay of the land, I was working with my CEO, my CFO, I was working with the head of engineering to see what they were talking about, to understand the language.” 

Time Stamps

[8:34] Driving success through collaboration and transparency

[14:28] Tradeshift's journey to becoming data-driven

[19:05] Getting visibility on the freshest data

[24:08] How to build credibility and trust in the data from company executives

[29:24] How to deriving more value for customers

[34:47] Under Pressure: How KJ Gupte makes difficult decisions

[38:39] Advice to budding data scientists

Links

Connect with KJ on LinkedIn

Check out Tradeshift

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

Follow Rob on Twitter

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com

This episode features an interview with Dr. Catherine Williams, Global Head of IQ at Qualtrics, an experience management software platform. Catherine has extensive background in data science and quantitative analytics. Prior to Qualtrics, Catherine served as Chief Data Scientist and Chief Data and Marketplace Officer at AppNexus and Xandr, which is part of AT&T. Catherine holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Washington. She has also held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford and Columbia Universities. On this episode, Catherine discusses growing a machine learning approach to unstructured data, using data to get to the “why” of customer behavior, and following your local happiness gradient.

Quotes

*”When you think about companies trying to operate, they derive lots of data about what humans are doing, their transactions and touch points with those humans. And that's really valuable information. There's great infrastructure for understanding that and operating on that. I think that's what people often mean when they say data-driven decisions. What are the objective facts of those interactions with the humans in your business? But that's missing a huge component, right? A lot of what drives human behavior is their subjective experience and that doesn't enter into the equation very often.”

*”Companies have measured customer satisfaction or the Net Promoter Score, which is how likely are you to recommend this business or product to a friend or neighbor. And so they try to get some sense of how people are feeling, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. And so what we're doing is just providing tools to derive a lot more information and really understand the why's of your behavior. Not just, your customers did these things, but why did they do those things? How are they feeling about it? How might that affect their loyalty or their future purchasing behavior?”

*“[My] graduate advisor told me to follow my local happiness gradient, which is a very nerdy math way of just saying ‘Follow your passion,’ but somehow framing it in math terms made it feel more authoritative to me. Later in my career, a wise CIO reminded me to always find those things in your day to day that nourish you. I’ll put those two together and make one piece of career advice that has been meaningful for me, is just to find those things that light me up and energize me and, and find that thing, that passion. I do think that finding and following that passion, following that joy actually leads to better career results.”

Time Stamps

*[5:20] Using NLP to derive insights from unstructured data

*[10:37] The importance of testing your own CX

*[11:51] Qualtrics’ journey to becoming data-driven

*[14:18] Promoting data literacy among employees

*[22:54] Understanding the “why” of customer behavior through data

*[27:39] Advice for people entering a career in AI

Links

Connect with Catherine on LinkedIn

Check out Qualtrics

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

Follow Rob on Twitter

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com

In this short episode,  Lauren is passing the torch to our new host, Rob Norman.  Rob is the Head of EMEA Marketing at Talend.

Links

Check out highlights from the last season:

Taking Charge of Your Health Through Data with Unmesh Srivastava, CTO at P3 Health Partners

How Technology Plays a Part in our "New Normal" with Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO at Nutanix

Creating a Culture of Excellence with John Foley, Former Lead Pilot of the Blue Angels

Empathy and Data go Hand in Hand with Karl Hightower, VP of Enterprise Information Management and Chief Data Officer at Novant Health

A brand new season of Truth Be Known is coming. Talend is excited to bring you insights from top data leaders about how they make hard decisions on tight deadlines and with imperfect information.

Lyssa Myska Allen: “No longer are we looking for like, where's our data or what's our data. We're trying to figure out what in the world to do with this data.”

Randy Bean: “We're really at the beginnings in many respects of the, of the data revolution.” 

Alana Winter: “We'll never have all the data and we'll never have all the information. Make your best guess based on what you have.” 

We’re also welcoming our new host, Rob Norman, Head of EMEA Marketing at Talend. He’ll be talking with some of the brightest minds in data, including CDOs at some of the top technology companies in the world. They’ll explore the pivotal decisions they’ve made in leading data-first organizations, the lessons they’ve learned, and how they seek truth in an uncertain world.

So join us as we dive deep into data and how it’s shaping the modern world. Welcome to Truth Be Known.

This episode features an interview with Ben Kepes, a professional board member, consultant, business owner and angel investor.  In this episode, Ben talks about how he chooses startups to fund, the overall importance of simple human connection, and finding patterns in data that lead to success.

Quotes

*“I remember talking to a friend once about what makes an angel investor successful or unsuccessful. And his thing was that it simply comes down to pattern matching. You see enough of these companies and you can identify the patterns that predict success. And to me that is all about data. It's taking insights from the myriad of different data types that we have available to us.  And what's really exciting is that today, that is able to be done by anyone because of the proliferation of data platforms, and because storage and processing of data is so much cheaper and more accessible. ” 

*“I think the thing that I have observed as an investor, as an observer and analyst of the tech space, is that there are so many entrepreneurs who deeply, deeply understand tech, but deeply, deeply don't understand people. And that just doesn't work. You have to understand the people you're selling to, the people that are going to be using the product and connect with individuals.”

*“Leveraging data is very, very important as part of a toolkit that can then augment what you can do as an individual. It doesn't replace what we can do as individuals.”

*“Data has been used for different reasons, but fundamentally the great thing about data platforms and technology, computer based data mining is that the infrastructure is the same. It's about getting lots and lots of different pieces of structured and unstructured data into a great big database and deriving some insights from that. So I really liked this notion of a great, big data lake and the ability to look at that data with different lenses. And I think that's the really exciting thing that we're seeing in our world. The ability for anyone within the business, within an organization to query data in a way that is meaningful and will derive insights that are meaningful for them.”

Time Stamps

*[5:23] Looking for patterns for success

*[6:26] The right patterns to look for

*[9:00] Data does not replace people

*[10:51] Deriving insights across the tech industry

*[15:19] Combining data with human knowledge for smarter results

*[18:31] Looking at both qualitative and quantitative data

*[23:53] The next bastion of data analytics

*[30:27] How to make better decisions

Links

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn

Follow Ben on Twitter

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn

Follow Lauren on Twitter

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com

This episode features an interview with René Waslo, Risk and Financial Advisory Principal at Deloitte & Touche.  She works as a cyber professional within the Energy, Resources and Industrials sector.  In this episode, René talks about zero trust, trends in security breaches, sustainability in cyber, and encouraging women to enter the cyber industry.

Quotes

*“Even though it's cyber that we're talking about, it's about relationships. Because cyber is trust. It's building digital trust in your environment, your systems. IFor us to be able to do that for clients, they need to trust us as humans. So, it definitely does come back to the ability to build those relationships.”

*“In the past you connected automatically and two machines automatically trusted each other, or two companies automatically trusted each other. And right now we're saying you just can't trust. So create a new trusted connection every time you connect. Building out that entire infrastructure is pretty technical.  It’s not going to be finished immediately, it's a journey.  So we work through topics like zero trust.”

*“A couple of years ago, they said the average number of devices that an individual connected into was at least seven. We're moving into a world of artificial intelligence and blockchain and all sorts of other great technologies. And that's all going to just continue to increase our need for cyber security.”

Time Stamps

*[5:03] Building Digital Trust with Clients

*[9:15] Sustainability in Cybersecurity

*[10:47] The Growing Complexity of the Digital World

*[12:34] Cybersecurity as a Tech and Business Role

*[14:04] The Growing Sophistication of Cybersecurity Breaches

*[20:04] The Fast-Changing World of Cyber

*[24:47] Implementing Identity Access Management, Including Connected Products

*[26:25] The Explosion of Sensor Technology

*[28:17] Discerning Important Data amid the Noise

*[30:22] Choosing Your Specialty in Cybersecurity

*[35:04] Women in Cybersecurity

Links

Connect with René on LinkedIn

Follow Lauren on Twitter

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com

This episode features an interview with Randy Bean, CEO of NewVantage Partners.  In this episode, Randy talks about what it means to be truly data-driven, growth in the industry, and the ethics around collecting and using data.

Quotes

“Being data-driven doesn't mean being a robot where you just look at the data and thereby make decisions blindly. You have to bring to bear human judgment and experience. But you should look at the data. You owe it yourself. You owe it to your customers, you owe it to your colleagues, and you owe it to the industry, to gather the best possible data, the most accurate, the most timely,  the highest quality data you have. Look at it, review it, analyze it, synthesize it, digest it, and then make some decisions.”

Time Stamps

*[3:26] Introducing Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Lessons in Data-Driven Leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI

*[5:59] Why is good data so important?

*[10:55] Common issues in becoming data-driven

*[12:46] How to start on the pathway to being data-driven

*[15:19] Data in layman’s terms

*[19:59] Using data to remain agile

*[21:19] What does “data-driven” mean anyway?

*[24:40] The beginning of the data revolution

*[25:27] The good, the bad and the ugly data ethics

*[35:13] Communicating the data message

Links

Check out Randy’s book, “Fail Fast, Learn Faster”

Connect with Randy on LinkedIn

Follow Randy on Twitter

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn

Follow Lauren on Twitter

Thanks to our friends

Truth Be Known is brought to you by Talend, a leader in data integration and data integrity, enabling every company to find clarity amidst the chaos. Talend Data Fabric brings together in a single platform all the necessary capabilities that ensure enterprise data is complete, clean, compliant, and readily available to everyone who needs it throughout the organization. Learn more at Talend.com