Investec’s Daniel Seymore on Change Management, Business Agility, and Developing Domain Expertise

Is the role of a data scientist still a “sexy job” or has it lost a bit of its luster? And what’s more important for successful data leaders, deep data knowledge or business savvy?

Daniel Seymore is the Head of Business Intelligence for Investec, a bank that is delivering out of the ordinary insights in the world of finance to help its customers create and manage wealth. One of Daniel’s career-guiding principles is to question the conventional, and on this episode of The Data Chief, he sheds light on some of these questions and shares how he is continuing to live by this principle to help Investec modernize its data capabilities. 

Daniel and Cindi also discuss why the only constant in life is change, which means businesses must place a larger emphasis on upskilling workforces. Lastly, the two dive into why domain expertise might be the most important skill for any data leader.

Main Takeaways

• Domain expertise matters: The hardest pivot for most technical professionals is moving away from day-to-day technical capabilities and into a leadership role. Data science is an important part of any company’s toolkit, but great leaders should understand the problems they’re solving on a business level and be able to relay it back in a way everyone can understand.
• Fail quickly to learn and adapt: With any project, it’s good to have a plan but it’s also important to embrace the idea of failure. The faster you fail, the sooner you can learn and adapt your processes to succeed.
• Change management is about partnerships: Gone are the days when employees sit back and take every direction from their boss at face value. Successful change managers recognize the individual value each employee can add to a project. They treat it as a partnership. And this is benefiting not just immediate teams, but the business as a whole.

About Daniel

Daniel Seymore joined Investec in 2016 and soon after got appointed to lead the Private Bank Business Intelligence team. Prior to Investec, Daniel worked at SARS as the Manager of the Performance Analytics team. His career has mainly been focused within the data realm with extensive experience within the fields of data analytics and decision sciences.

At Investec Daniel is responsible for operational and strategic management of the business intelligence and operational analytics capability within the Private Bank department. This includes identifying and implementing machine learning use cases and scaling the capability enterprise wide, refactoring and streamlining of data warehouse processes and implementation of self-service capabilities for end-users.

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The Data Chief is presented by our friends at ThoughtSpot. Searching through your company’s data for insights doesn’t have to be complicated. With ThoughtSpot, anyone in your organization can easily answer their own data questions, find the facts, and make better, faster decisions. Learn more at thoughtspot.com. 

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.