Pilot Flying J’s Ameet Shetty on Cloud Data Infrastructure, Governance, Analytics Talent

Data governance. It’s a “dirty word” in business often associated with being told “no,” but from the perspective of the CDO it’s a crucial part of managing data quality and trust. How are employees being held accountable? Do people have the right access to insights? And is your own business’ data infrastructure and governance policies fostering innovation or stifling it? 

Ameet Shetty is Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Pilot Flying J, a company that serves more than 1.3 million consumers daily while operating more than 750 locations stateside. On this episode of The Data Chief, Ameet joins Cindi for a conversation on data governance and how to organize your analytics team. Ameet explains why governance gets a bad rap while also touching on the importance of balancing accountability with innovation, having the right technology foundation in place, and the most successful CDOs are natural connectors.

Main Takeaways

• Lean on data as a driver for customer insights and intimacy: Data is key to creating unique personalized touchpoints for your customers. By allowing customers to willingly provide information across all the business touchpoints, this creates a chance to drive insights and move the organizations forward. Companies can use this information to create a stickier connection with the user by providing more personalized experiences in-store or across its apps, but this also gives the business a chance to enhance every touch point and provide a consistent user experience.
• Building a holistic team pushes you forward: A single individual cannot pull the boat forward, but a team rowing together can get the boat to where it needs to go. When building teams, make sure you are taking a holistic approach and bringing in members from different fields of expertise and backgrounds to close the gap in areas where you are not as strong
• Over-governing stifles innovation: The term governance is a dirty word for a lot of enterprises, but it’s more important to think about governance not as a burden or regulatory issue but more as data management. It’s important always to maintain data quality, but you must have a balance because you don’t want to govern your data to the point that it stifles innovation.

About Ameet

Ameet Sheet is the Chief Data Officer at Pilot Flying J. Prior to joining Pilot, Ameet served as McDonald’s first Chief Data Officer. Ameet is helping to define and infuse data across the global enterprise.  He is creating the roadmap to identify the technology, team, process and culture change required for enabling enterprise data transformation and establish best-in-class processes for data strategy and governance and evangelizing these changes throughout McDonald’s.

Prior to McDonald’s, Ameet was the Chief Data & Analytics Officer for SunTrust Banks, Inc.  In this role, he led the Enterprise Data & Analytics office, with responsibility for driving the strategic vision and effective deployment of data and business intelligence capabilities to improve efficiency, reduce risk, and enable strategic business growth.

Ameet earned an MBA in Marketing from Georgia State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from the University of Georgia.  

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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.