ThoughtSpot’s Cindi Howson on Chief Data Officer Success Strategies

Much like a roller coaster, 2020 was full of many loops, twists, and turns. From accelerated digital transformations to expedited migrations to the cloud, you were asked to do it all— often with far less time and resources. Through it all, The Data Chief was right there with you, along for the unprecedented ride. 

From the beginning this podcast had a vision: To bring you learnings and best practices from the brightest minds in our industry to help you all become better data stewards. On this episode of The Data Chief, we look back at some of the key themes from season one, including the rise of the CDO, the intricacies of aligning your department’s goals with that of the businesses, and how you coped with accelerated timelines. While we relive these important conversations, we also discuss why culture and data fluency continue to be the biggest hurdles to becoming a truly data-driven business.

Main Takeaways

• The Rise of the Data Chief: The role of the CDO now goes beyond getting your data house in order. You must become a true analytics leader and business partner by developing a deep understanding of how to properly build a team and nurture strategic partnerships.
• Aligning with Your Business Values: Data is the lifeline of every organization but in order to achieve buy-in from your stakeholders, your data and analytic investments have to be aligned with the goals of your company. This means asking what projects are right for your team to pursue and which ones make the most sense for the overall direction of the organization.
• Rapid Technical Innovation and the Shift to Cloud: How we store and manage our data is changing rapidly. Many companies are moving their data to the cloud and their vendors are often the ones helping drive this change.
• Technology Reflects Culture: Technology and culture are two sides of the same coin. A culture of fear, protecting the status quo, and settling for “good enough” often engenders legacy tech saddled by inefficient processes. At the other end of the spectrum, organizations who are embracing cloud and augmented analytics are empowering new decision makers at the speed business demands.
• Assessing your Data Fluency: Investing in data fluency and partnering with business stakeholders to build these skills across your organization is part of your mandate as a Data Chief. As an industry, we need to flip the emphasis from technical training to using data in a business context.

About Cindi

Cindi Howson is an analytics and BI expert with 20-plus years’ experience and a flair for bridging business needs with technology. Cindi was previously a Gartner Vice President in data and analytics, lead author of the Analytics and BI Magic Quadrant, data and analytics maturity model, as well as research in data and AI for good, NLP/BI Search, and augmented analytics. She introduced the BI bake-offs and innovation panels at Gartner events globally and is a popular keynote speaker. Prior to this, she was the founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth product reviews based on exclusive hands-on testing, a contributor to Information Week, and the author of several books including Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data and SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference. She served as The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) faculty member for more than a decade. Prior to founding BI Scorecard, Howson was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for Dow Chemical. She has an MBA from Rice University and a BA from the University of Maryland.

--

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. 

-- 

For full show notes and more, go to thedatachief.com.

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.