Mario Fario
As data and data management have rapidly become drivers of potential business value, discussions over the need for a Chief Data Officer to champion data strategy have been pervasive. But let’s assume the need is prevalent; how will this person realistically make a valuable input in the enterprise? What should be the CDO’s end goal, and how does a CDO make sure that in the first year on the job, things get done?
Contributor
Transcript (The Chief Data Officer Playbook)
Speaker A [00:00:00]:
CIO Talk Radio is brought to you by HP and Siemens Smart Grid. Welcome to CIO Talk Radio with your host, Sanjog Aul. All comments, views and opinions expressed on this show are strictly those of the host, guests and callers. Now here’s Sanjog Aul.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:26]:
Good morning and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www,ciotalkradio.com and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, #ctrlive and look for this show as #data. Today’s topic is the Chief Data Officer Playbook and our guests for today’s show are Dr. Eugene Kolker, who’s the CDO and head of Bioinformatics and High Throughput Analysis Laboratory at Seattle Children’s Hospital and he’s also the co founder of Delsa. Delsa, the Data Enabled Life Sciences Alliance. How are you, Dr.?
Sanjog Aul [00:01:04]:
Eugene?
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:01:05]:
Hello. I’m fine. How are you?
Sanjog Aul [00:01:07]:
Good. So life is treating you? Good.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:01:09]:
Yes. Can I make minor comment? My title is a little bit off, if that’s okay.
Sanjog Aul [00:01:15]:
Sure. Please share and correct for us.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:01:18]:
So I am Chief Data Officer for Seattle Children’s Enterprise, which consists of hospital research institute and foundation and I’m Head of Bioinformatics and High Throughput Analysis Lab at Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
Sanjog Aul [00:01:36]:
Okay, great. So that’s even. It means that you got even more responsibility, so bigger paycheck for you, right?
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:01:42]:
I’m not sure about the latter one. The first one is correct.
Sanjog Aul [00:01:47]:
All right, great. Good to have you. And we also have Mario Fario, who’s the Data Strategy Advisor, Boa Vista, and also the Big Data Advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s also a member of DEMA and the MIT Data Science Initiative. Good morning, Mario. How are you?
Mario Fario [00:02:03]:
Good morning Sanjog. Nice to talk to you again.
Sanjog Aul [00:02:05]:
Yes, and the pleasure is all mine so looking forward to a great conversation. Welcome to this show. Now, before we get started, we have an announcement. This morning marks the start of a new contest series, our CIO Talk Radio Summer of Reading. Every two weeks through the end of summer, CIO Talk Radio will be giving away a book to a lucky listener and to kick off the series, we are giving away the book. The name is the case of the Chief Data Officer Recasting the C suite to leverage your most valuable asset by Dr.
Sanjog Aul [00:02:36]:
Peter Aiken and Michael Gurman. It looks at the three pillars of a CDO’s job to help an organization’s data achieve its full value. So it’s very appropriate for today’s show. In fact, you can join our mailing list and visit our website for more information and to enter. By the way, a few weeks back we actually took CIO talk radio on the road and did a live show on CDOs and how we will go about defining their role and debating the need for this role but the next logical step was to take that conversation to the next level and ask what should the CDO do now that we have one in an organization and how does the CDO really make a difference and move the needle in his or her first few months or a year on the job? So with that said, Eugene, I’ll start with you. When we are looking at a CDO and the one basic question comes is who should the CDO report to? And if you’re going to have different perceptions of this role in different organizations, would you say there is one common definition that organizations have come to realize should be used in order to determine what their responsibility should be, what their reporting relationship should be?
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:03:51]:
That’s a great question. I think with regard to who CDO should report to, it really depends on the industry and who are major stakeholders in that specific enterprise and strategically who are enterprise customers. In our case and our case is kind of guinea pig, we started six and a half years ago to our knowledge that was first CDO position in healthcare. My reporting is directly to president of research Dr. Jim Hendricks and to global CEO Dr. Tom Hansen but we were writing this book more or less from the scratch. My for example job description was consulted by web,
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:04:45]:
I would put it this way of job description we were able to find back then of Yahoo CDO and Capital One. So that’s basically our starting point. Nowadays you have much more CDO positions in many different industries so it’s easier to consult with specific industry. I can give you example of Yahoo CDO story that this person started as reporting to Chief Information officer on VP level and also responsible for Yahoo Research Labs then became kind of grew up and became larger high responsibilities were taken for this individual and then at some point CIO was reporting to Yahoo CDO it ended at some point. That position is to my knowledge no longer at Yahoo but I think it depends on different industries and customers. It looks like in some for example in legal area what I heard from colleagues, sometimes people combine positions of CDO with Chief analytics officer or alike. Okay, so I don’t think there is one size fits all kind of approach.
Sanjog Aul [00:06:13]:
So with that said Mario, if you were to look at the way the world is moving and the way CDO is getting introduced to the organization. Eugene, thank you so much for sharing some of the background and how your organization became a guinea pig and you tried different ways to see where they could add most value. Mario, do you think all the lessons that have been learned so far, can we realistically come to a conclusion which will allow us to appropriately position this role in an organization so that we are proactive in terms of removing any roadblocks from the get go?
Mario Fario [00:06:48]:
Yes, absolutely. As you might know, this term CDO is quite new in the market and the bitterness of this position so far is that we are creating a new ways to explore the benefits of this position. So for my opinion, a CDO is someone who manages a services organization, a shared services organization inside a company. So the CDO is responsible at the end of the day to bring data quality, to monetize on data, to make sure that data is being used as a strategic and economic asset for the organization. So we’re still creating the job descriptions and on my job at Boa Vista, which is an Equifax joint venture, I was so glad because I was responsible for writing my job description and I’ve seen a lot of organizations here in United States as well that they want to have someone, but they are not sure how to bring that person.
Mario Fario [00:07:59]:
They know that they have a problem, they know that they want to use the most of their data, but they don’t know how to do that. So I have seen so far CDOs reporting to CEOs, to COOs or to people with marketing or the supply chain. The most important thing is that you have to bear in mind a CDO should not be reporting to CIO. This is not a technology function. It is more like a business function inside the organization. Why? Because it does not feel the pain because of poor data quality so if you were really serious about data and about data management, analytics, and you want to bring a CDO, please make that person be reporting to the line of.
Sanjog Aul [00:08:52]:
Okay, so with that said, this is an interesting comment that you made, Mario. Eugene coming back to you so as per Mario, the person should not report to a CIO If they were to report to a CEO, they will find it to be too tactical. CEO, CFO, of course, don’t make you know they’re not relevant to this role. If you were to say you’re going to report to the line of business, imagine how many bosses you can have with each particular organization, which is a business unit, perhaps have their own leaders having their own needs to manage data and then CDO is getting torn apart because everybody would like to get their job done first. Do you think that’s realistic for anyone to come in and have five bosses who are going to pull their own weight to get this person to deliver with their team what they want?
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:09:37]:
Yeah. So I think I feel Mario Payne and I would second his take on not reporting to CIO primarily because it’s different culture. I work with my CIO just fine. I worked with previous CIO, it’s great relationship, but it’s different culture and different approaches and I think Mario is 200% right. It’s not about technology, it’s about people and it’s about business so at some point in my first couple years, I did have not five bosses, but three bosses
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:10:18]:
that was extremely unhealthy. Now I have one direct reporting to Dr. Hendricks and indirect CEO, global CEO and that’s actually helping a lot. I would say in ideal case, because these positions are new and institution enterprise should take them very seriously. In ideal case, CDO should report to the top of the command. CEO would be ideal case.
Sanjog Aul [00:10:51]:
But do you think CEO will take it as strategic or they will say, okay, fine, you got to handle data, go ahead and deal with that data but it’s not really coming as close to the overall strategic enterprise oversight that a CEO has and they may find it to too tactical. Do you think that’s the case or this is just a myth?
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:11:14]:
So I think it depends on institutions. Why would you start CDO position right these days and not think about this strategically? You know, unless you’re doing and using like Mario said, utilizing data as strategic enterprise, institutional assets. Right. Unless you’re doing that and try to monetize it, of course properly, unless you’re doing that strategically, you’re not going to gain anything within very short tactical timeframe. There is no way so because it’s about people, about business, about change of culture, tradition, sometimes myths as well. So I think the closer to the very top, the higher chances this position is going to be successful.
Sanjog Aul [00:11:59]:
Great. So yeah, go ahead. Mario, you have a comment?
Mario Fario [00:12:02]:
Yeah, I do. And that’s the point, Sanjog, you should avoid. If you are a CDO, you’ve just been promoted or just being hired to a new organization, you should avoid this trap of being considered a technical position that’s not your job and if the company pushes you to be technical, so there is a problem of your expectations or how the company is seeing that data is being used. In my point of view, that’s one of the mistakes it has committed for the last 10 years. It’s been considered a tactical position which is not.
Mario Fario [00:12:40]:
I’ve seen what I call the three architectures inside any company. You have the business architecture which are composed by your rules, your go to market strategy, your organization structure. You see your technology architecture. If you’re going to use a cloud infrastructure, what kind of service you’re going to be using, what kind of technology you’re going to support your business and I’ve seen the data architecture which is the field that will support the business and also the technology. So do not go to this trap and put yourself on a tactical position. You are not. The more strategic you are, the more you understand the business, the better you work with your CIO, the more successful you will be.
Sanjog Aul [00:13:27]:
All right, so Mario, a follow up question I have for you. Suppose now we get onboarded based on this role and we are just about to get started. Like any leadership position initially you got to come and listen, you got to watch and you got to sense and read between the lines to see what is going on. If you are doing all of that, what is it that you should be listening for? What is it that you should be doing in terms of gauging the organization’s receptivity levels to see if they are actually ready to embrace the change? Just because the top boss or a business unit leader championed a role like a CDO into an organization, that doesn’t mean you will have everything and all people all gung ho to invite you with open arms and help you become successful. So what is it that you’re listening to or listening for in order to know how you’re going to set the stage and your strategy going forward in order for you to be successful but do not yet start your response here because we will take a quick break. Let’s come back and explore this further. Please stay tuned.
Sanjog Aul [00:16:21]:
Welcome back. So Mario, coming into an organization, what do you listen for? What do you read between the lines? What are you going to watch so that you get a good understanding and see if these people are really ready to make the most of this new role.
Mario Fario [00:16:36]:
Okay, I think it starts prior during your interviews, even if you are promoted from within or you’re bringing from outside. So before you make a decision, try to understand what and where you’re getting into because you will find resistance. You can expect a lot of ambiguity inside the companies. A lot of people are not going to be happy with you because you are there to break some silos, you are there to streamline some operations. You are there to do something that has never done before. So on the first hundred days on the job, my recommendation is try to listen to the hidden signs. Try to get to know as many people as you can. Try to understand from the business leaders what are their pains, what they did not able to achieve and write your plan in a sense that you can have small concourse on every week, on every day
Mario Fario [00:17:43]:
you can deliver something but do not forget your long term goal. So my point on that is that if you are a CDO, one of the skills that you might have is resilience. You might be a resilient guy because you are there because you are seen as an agent of change and change really, hurts and I faced that on my previous job. It was a very interesting experience and it took for some parts of the company at least six months for them to understand what my role, the role of my team were
Mario Fario [00:18:31]:
and as we got closer, as we deliver something, as we’re helping to bring results that reflect on our bottom line, which is more relev and increase profitability, the more respect we got from the
Sanjog Aul [00:18:49]:
other people. See Mario, your response is great, however, I’d like to get some more clarity and get to the specifics because your response could be utilized for someone who is any leader who comes into an organization and they know that there might be some resistance. So if you were to go to specifics for a CDO, what is it that you would when listening to, you will figure out that this individual or this group is not as ready to accept data related change or they’re the ones who are ready to champion you within the organization and especially the reason I’m asking this question to get to a granular level is because at the top, people can of course have the ready ways of figuring out what is going wrong or right. But then people who are coming in, they may hear certain things and they can perhaps map it back to whether it’s going in the right direction or not. So what would those specific statements that people may make, what was those specific settings that people will create which could set you up for success or failure?
Mario Fario [00:19:56]:
You’re absolutely right on that. What I’ve told you is something that any leader has to do and you’re the data leader and what you’re going to be doing and apply those things, however, use your best knowledge, which is the data knowledge, the technology knowledge, the communications knowledge, and also your ability to use data to bring business results so try to access what you have, try to understand what data you have inside,how this data can be used in the times to come. So it’s better for you to access the data, better to you to access the skills of the team that you’re going to be managing try to map the level of how beta is being used in your organization. Some companies are very beta driven and they have a very strong maturity. Some companies are not.
Mario Fario [00:20:55]:
So you have to apply all those knowledge that I’ve told you to bring your organization to a maturity level where data is going to be used on every day, on every decision and to do that, there might be some areas that you have to work first. Maybe you have a problem that’s more related to attracting new customers. Or maybe your problem is related to avoiding churn or maybe your problem is that because you are not invoicing your customers properly, so you have to select a few areas and deliver on those most critical areas first. That’s the only way that you’re going to be delivering the results. Your tool is going to be the data.
Sanjog Aul [00:21:40]:
So Eugene, if you were to take specific examples from your experience, what mandates and what requests that were Made for you to get to deliver certain areas or basically have you deliver certain results, told you that they are looking for you as the right person to do it but also not only just making requests, but also they show signs that they are paving the way for you to really deliver it versus saying I want you to deliver the moon, but I don’t even give you a ladder to get there.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:22:13]:
Yeah. So I think my case was one of those cases that organizations and me personally making mistakes. Not all possible mistakes, but all major mistakes, you know, possible. Okay. When I came, within very short time, our CIO was leaving the job. Okay. So for many people there was huge confusion so some people assumed that I going to take that role
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:22:46]:
so that didn’t help, I can tell you that for sure. So thanks God! Within a year after I came, we been hiring CIO and CTO, it was a strong team. That was very. It was great to have that, you know, confusion cleared but let me step back for, you know, one minute and tell that what I would agree with Mario with regard to agents of change and that’s obviously the case and then all what he said, I would second it.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:23:21]:
Now, as to specifics, there are some words or processes or approaches of the enterprise which are positive and should help you to navigate this is the right place or not. So from my experience of other people I talked before our talk show, some of the keywords would be lean, continuous performance improvement. Those are things that basically on positive side would indicate that this organization is trying to improve itself. At the same time, those are kind of incremental changes and CGO as position of change is bringing a lot of hard feelings, right, so and it’s all about people.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:24:15]:
You need to understand your key stakeholders so for example, from my experience, you know our, you know, uber customer, of course not. You know our organizational people, but you know, our patients and families and that actually helps to understand who are customers of your enterprise. By doing that, you can reverse engineer where you know your trajectory should go and the first days, that’s, you know, I’m not sure. It’s hard to give specific examples for all these different industries a little bit, for example, in financial, CDO position is most established for over 20 years starting from Capital One
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:24:58]:
so I mean it’s industry specific. But you need to understand if people are willing to make changes, that that’s the key and that’s more about human potential rather than specific technologies in your enterprise.
Sanjog Aul [00:25:16]:
So Mario, if I were to give you an organization, say let’s take retail and they also are very dependent on data and you were to go into a retail environment just taking as a case study or a role play, if you will and we say we want to have a CDO come in and want to have that person work for the first six months to do a certain set of things or deliver a few results. What would be your plan of attack? You can take that, or if you have any other vertical in mind, use that other one if you feel more comfortable. But bottom line is, what are your logical set of steps in a playbook that you would recommend to a CTO for the first few months so that it looks like the person is getting an idea of what should be done and they are actually logically implementing it.
Mario Fario [00:26:04]:
Okay, great question and I love the retail environment. First of all, if you’re a retailer, you tend to have lower margins on your business it’s a very competitive environment, it’s a dog eat dog marketplace. So I would first try to understand what is happening with the business at this point. In a sense that the numbers, what’s happening with the profits throughout the years, is it going down or is increasing? I would try to understand if there is a loyalty card program in place that we really can understand the granularity of all the purchases that your customers are doing. And we try to see if those purchases what we call the basket market analysis, in a sense, what kind of products each kind of customers are buying, in a sense, what kind of customers your female customers are, what kind of products your female customers are buying, your male customers are buying, what geography tends to have the largest revenue and work together with the financial people, with the sales people, with the marketing people, try to really narrow down, try to go into the data and help them to make those decisions.
Mario Fario [00:27:31]:
In case of retailers, you have so much information that you acquire from your point of sale devices, that information that you can acquire from data sources and companies that provide data like Nielsen and other reports and you can get data from companies like Equifax, like Axiom or Experian, and you can combine those data with your data that you can generate insights for the business and with that you try to solve those problems. That makes sense. You’re trying to do what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to bring new customers. Maybe you want to export data from social media to say what people are saying about your product, or maybe you want to do an analysis of your shelves to see if you change something on the positions of some stores, you might enhance some sales of specific products, what we call AB Testing and if you have an online environment that you do sales as well on your E commerce site, you might want to compare what is happening in there, comparing to a physical store to see things that you can move from one place to another, strategies that are working well in one channel that you can replicate to the other. On the other hand, things that are not going so well that you want to re change. So in a sense you got to look at the data that you have, you got to look at data that you have from outside.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:07]:
So let’s take a quick break but when we come back, Mario, I’d like to further expand on this because what you just shared is more of a strategy or a plan of attack. We are talking about specific steps because I’m sure the kind of things that you mentioned, that’s not going to happen in a few months. But you have to set the stage and you’re coming new into an organization. So you got to build your team, you got to get together with other people and now that you have laid out say a roadmap based on what your last response is, how would you go about executing it? Because of course, you know, putting a strategy is not simple, of course, but that is just paper, that’s just talking and people say show me the results, show me the money. So what would you do in the first few months so that they start seeing that whatever you mentioned initially is actually going to come to fruition? Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
Speaker A [00:31:19]:
You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sonjog All. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalk. if you have a question or comment, call toll free at 1-866-472-5790. That number again is 1-866-472-5710. Now back to the show. Here’s Son Jog All.
Sanjog Aul [00:31:44]:
Welcome back. So Mario, you laid out the strategy, now this is action time. So give us a few logical steps in the first few months which you will start taking to make this a reality.
Mario Fario [00:31:56]:
Okay. They will not give you millions of dollars at your first month. They will probably give just a few amount of money for you to prove why you’re there. So I will attack one of the problems, critical problem that I can solve with the amount of money that was given to me and I will use something that Eugene mentioned before, Lean. I will try to use what I call it works well for me when I say it’s kites and bleeds that in a very short period of time you identify a problem, you lay out the actions that you want to do and you execute on that. And a Kaizen blitz program, it lasts for just weeks and you should be delivering results on that. In a retailer environment it’s very, easy to do that, to select a problem, use the data, use the great people that you have to deliver those insights. Then you can pursue business results.
Mario Fario [00:32:54]:
Eugene, do you want to comment on that?
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:32:57]:
So that’s a great point. I think we are so much on the same page, it’s maybe not so interesting for listeners, but I would add a couple points here. Again, this is strategy position so you need to learn what strategy of your enterprise is, what are specific points they need to achieve within certain period of then reverse engineer it using priorities of the enterprise and implement it. Make it simple, concise so for example, in our case we are in healthcare, so we are trying to improve care of our patients. Okay so basically you know, low hanging fruit along those lines, you know, one of the low hanging fruit for us was modeling of number of beds we need to build to improve care, to bring more patients.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:33:54]:
Then another low hanging fruit could be if you work with your key stakeholders and come up with something which is extremely important for them to be done differently because you have expertise they don’t have and it’s about very specific low hanging fruit. So put your expectations appropriately and try to message it appropriate as well so you need to be very simple, concise, work on low hanging fruit and you know, along priorities of your enterprise. I think that’s kind of, you know, important one in healthcare. It’s a little bit different from say retailer, right. If we’re talking about data attributes, so we talk about, I don’t know if it’s appropriate to talk right now about like you know, we and other people call it 5V’s of Big Data. So it’s not about volume and velocity, it’s more about variety and veracity and we all of course after value but in our case it’s much more diverse and complex data type and uncertainty of data and trusting each and every data set is slim to zero
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:35:14]:
so you know this specific for healthcare. So you need to not to get yourself into trap of those issues. So I think again low hanging fruit, very specific pain points of your enterprise. Just you know, what is doable without basically anything on lean budget, on lean, you know, number of people, what is doable as soon as possible and that’s going to be obvious when you talk to your key stakeholders. It’s going to be obvious what you need to do.
Sanjog Aul [00:35:49]:
So Eugene, when you mentioned this and you say you come in there and you take the quick wins, one of the important thing is that you yourself as a lone warrior cannot make this happen. When you’re coming into an organization and yes, they invited you as a leader, I’m sure you have to take a second look at what resources do you have, which could mean people, which could mean also the process maturity and of course the technology that may be available before you can commit to anything in the first few months. You cannot produce miracles with just what you have till the time you’ve actually looked at it and say can we make any, make any sense of what we have to do or can we create any value? So if you were to say first take the people side, do you think typically when a CDU is entering an organization today, they are handed over a great set of Hercules level warriors who will be going and doing anything at your command or you have to clean up the shop and or have to make major changes before you can commit to anything getting done.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:36:45]:
So I think it’s neither but it’s closer to letter one. I think in many enterprises people are ready for this kind of change theoretically but on practical terms they are not because they don’t know how to do it. Okay. Otherwise they would be done by now. Okay. So what you basically need to do, you need to find your local champions.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:37:08]:
Okay. In our case, you know, in case of Healthcare, for example, of course, physicians, very important. So physician champions are extremely important. You know, I was lucky to find, you know, medical director and chief pediatrician as our local champions. They are very data centric people as well as my two visionaries who, you know, president of research and global CEO who decided to make this major, you know, leap of faith and start this position first in the entire industry, not in this country, but just, you know, worldwide. So I think importance to find local champions is, couldn’t be overstated. Okay. And then those people are much more familiar with what’s happening in this enterprise.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:37:57]:
They’ve been around, so they’ve been respected and you need to find those local champions in order to get your work done because you’re absolutely right. Rarely you come to the place which is well run institution and simply want to step it up along those lines. Usually data analytics and those issues are not really well developed usually.
Sanjog Aul [00:38:23]:
So when it comes to the finances you mentioned that you will be given. In fact, I remember Mario’s comment that initially they’ll not give you a lot of money and perhaps that is because there is not enough trust developed or maybe the initiatives are not well defined. So what is your approach to building the business case for those first few projects based on which you get just about enough money? Just saying that because I’m new, give me whatever you have and I’ll try to prove you something. This is almost like you’re not at the best end of the bargain here, Eugene.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:38:55]:
Yes, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, except maybe data driven organizations which do exist, but still very much minority. Except for those organizations, people are skeptical, maybe sometimes resistance basically somebody who knows about data or analytics gonna come and what, tell me how to do my work better. That kind of attitude, you know, is important too and you know, that’s it’s hard to change again, that’s it’s not gonna be done within few months, I would say within few months. How to put it maybe on joke side, you know, just try to survive. Okay.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:39:40]:
I think what you need to do is basically take on very low hanging fruits, okay, and execute, implement and deliver and by doing that you’re going to get a little bit more trust. Then, you know, it’s iterative process, right? You’re going to get more serious tasks, right and then you get on them and try to improve your situation with, you know, expertise wise, you know, support wise, process wise and then you get to much more serious tasks and doing in iterations because I think this is actually key lessons we learned based on our experience and people I talk to so basically you have your production happening and then you do introduce this change and do it in small steps first baby steps and then little bit longer steps.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:40:31]:
Maybe you then at some point start to run right. So but that’s doing it iteratively. Okay.
Sanjog Aul [00:40:38]:
So Mario, what type of business cases that you have seen traditionally getting you just the right amount, not more, not less of dollars and cents and also the other resources that you want in order for you to actually deliver initial successes?
Mario Fario [00:40:55]:
Well, I can share you my experience and from Talking to other CDOs and other people working with data, they seem to follow the same path that I’m describing here. So map the issues that we find so you have to talk to the executives, the leaders for marketing, sales, finance to see what the pain points that they have and having those pain points, you have to narrow down which ones you’re going to work first and maybe it’s not your decision. Maybe you have to put everyone together in one room to decide what’s going to be best for the company for you to approach first and then you have to do what is called the business plan or the return on investment equation. You’re going to apply a certain amount of dollars, but you’re going to bring that result
Mario Fario [00:41:45]:
and that result will mean that you help the business to bring more money or you help to solve an issue here that’s dragging your profitability, or you help some areas here to improve their operations and by improving their operations, then they can have less people to do that work or they can do more with the same AM of people and resources available. So at the end of the day, it’s a matter of the equation that you will find something that you have a clear understanding of your return on investment and you deliver on that and the bitterness of the market today is that everything became a commodity. Like you can have the best technology available, you can have the best databases, the best methodologies available. The critical point at this point that we are passing through Sanjog is people we are on a shortage of good people, people who really can deliver people with data and analytics skills are not that easy to find today.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:42:57]:
So I can jump in if that’s okay?
Sanjog Aul [00:42:59]:
Yes, please go ahead.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:42:59]:
I would agree this is about people and it looks like we’re not answering specific questions right. Of our host, but it is really about people. People with this exceptional expertise which are in very short demand, but also people in enterprise, they used to do things the way they doing them right now. So it’s really difficult to do this differently and then of of course you’re going to have people like in our place as a joke they call us data doctors, okay, if they like us or data geeks or nerds if they don’t. Okay. So you need to have that very reasonable approach how to deal with different types of stakeholders and you better have some kind of alignment within your organization not only on the top level but also on level of people who can implement your recommendations.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:43:58]:
So I think a clearer approach, much simpler, more concerns and priorities, you know, think this is killer. You need to make sure that this is doable and in specific order and then you know, the rest would be, I would say you’re going to see consequences of that because at some point, you know, maybe it’s going to take months, it’s going to take years, it depends, you know, at some point you would be slammed with requests and you know, people coming to you. This is the ideal position to be and that’s not going to happen within a few months unless you know, enterprise in very dire state, which I’m not sure that’s the best place to join.
Sanjog Aul [00:44:39]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. When we come back. Eugene, I’d like to ask you a follow on question which is you spoke about people is very like, you know, handling people is very important. So what is what kind of organizational structure, what organizational mission and vision and other principles and values that you feel would be appropriate for a CDO to establish so that the people who they may inherit from within the organization who you may have to end up working with just because somebody gave them to you or the ones that you hire or the ones that you groom, all of them come on the same level and so that when you are under the gun to deliver some quick wins initially and then bigger wins later on, these people are all on board and you have a predictable success versus trying to flip a coin and see what works. So please stay tuned. We’ll be right back and explore.
Sanjog Aul [00:47:20]:
Welcome back. So, Eugene, the question is around people. What kind of organizational structure and strategy and processes, values, mission, vision that you would want to establish as a CDO coming in so that you attract the right people, retain the best people and basically manage automatically those people out who are not strategically fitting in that whole equation?
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:47:45]:
Sanjog, that’s a fantastic question. It’s really tough to answer. I try to be concise. So I think the key point of CDO position is to bring decision from opinion based angle to informed decision, data driven decisions. Okay, so then you need to have, you know, people on your team who are able to deliver those kind of informed decisions. So which basically goes like this. You analyze the problem, you talk to key stakeholders, you try to, you know, make it as structural as possible. This analysis, okay, you know, in our experience, expertise in specific areas is extremely important.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:48:31]:
But listening to each and everybody’s point of view, it’s hard to basically justify because there are a lot of myths, a lot of traditions which are not ideal, not optimized. So what you basically do, you need to talk to key stakeholders, understand the problem. You need to bring your insights to something actionable, which is extremely difficult. You need to go from insights, translate them into actionable items. So I basically, as a joke, put in my presentations, last couple of my presentations, IT and AI and by IT and AI, I mean insights, translation translated into actionable items, not IT and artificial intelligence. So it’s about people who are able to analyze the problem, other type of people who are able to translate it. You need to be very simple, concise and put priorities in front of people who are extremely busy doing their jobs
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:49:37]:
so any change of course can bring added value that’s obvious only with that in mind but you need to make it easier on them. So you basically going to be many times working contrary to their assumption and their perceptions, which is very difficult. So to change ultimate decisions and to make it better for your customer. In our case, it’s patients, right and to enterprise, you need to be very careful in the translational angle. So you need to have not only data geeks, I’m sorry, but also people who made this translation possible, who can present it easier, who can make it concise.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:50:20]:
Message is important, communication is extremely important as well. You need to be as soft on people as you can possibly be.
Sanjog Aul [00:50:29]:
Now when you talk about that, Mario, I have an interesting question here about the emotional intelligence, because you did mention about resilience that a CDO must have. But it also requires some sort of emotional intelligence so that they are able to manage different situatio but equally important is building the right relationships and nurturing them so that you are able to get the job done. You’re almost a politician, right? You got to really go ahead and make the right, build and nurture right relationships so which ones are those? The relationships that you have to focus on and nurture.
Mario Fario [00:51:06]:
The most excellent point, and probably because of my Latin heritage, I love to build good working relationships. I always love to go to lunch with other executives, to talk to them, to understand their problems, to share some thoughts and to ask for advice and when I joined Boavista, my team was very demotivated because we had a lot of pressure from our sales people and our products people and they were bashing us every day and every hour. They seen us on the hall, they were bashing us because they said, oh, we cannot achieve our numbers because our data quality is terrible we are losing money because of you data people so I got in a very demotivated organization. So what I did to overcome that barrier and use my resilience skills was to first understand exactly what were the problems.
Mario Fario [00:52:11]:
Why do you think that we had data problems? And by doing a lot of benchmarking and a lot of data analytics and understanding why we’re having problems, the perception of the problems that we had, which turned to be not the reality at the end of the day and by working quite well with our users and our customers and customers, we’re able to achieve that and from this very demotivated organization, people that were not happy to do their work and they think about living. I was able to create a very top notch organization, very well recognized and because of that, and because we proved to our people that we’re able to deliver, then we’re able to build and solidify those relationships inside the company.
Sanjog Aul [00:53:11]:
Okay, I have one last question and only 30 seconds each, max. Start with you, Eugene. Since you are coming in as a data person and a data leader, you got an information officer who while you would not want to see yourself reporting to, but you will have to work with. So if you had to build that relationship, what kind of relationship would you like to see be between CIOs and the CDOs for it to be successful? 30 seconds each, max.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:53:40]:
You need to be partners and you have to be partners. Otherwise it’s going to be not good for enterprise and ultimately for your customers. So partnership is key.
Sanjog Aul [00:53:52]:
All right, Mario.
Mario Fario [00:53:54]:
Partnership and you have to bear in mind that you’re part of a larger picture. So the team from it, they have their own goals to achieve. You have to help them as well. Together working with it will serve the business needs. So partnership is key and understand that you are a service provider to someone else.
Sanjog Aul [00:54:16]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank Eugene and Mario for sharing your thoughts on how a CDO, Chief Data Officer can actually come into an organization and make a predictable and a good, sizable significant difference in the way they handle data and correspondingly get value out of it.
Dr. Eugene Kolker [00:54:36]:
Thank you Sanjog. Thank you very much for inviting. Thank you Mario.
Mario Fario [00:54:40]:
Thanks. Appreciate it doctor.
Sanjog Aul [00:54:41]:
You guys and listeners, please like us on Facebook search for CIO Talk Radio and please be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host till next week. Take care and God bless.
Speaker A [00:54:56]:
Thank you for tuning in to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. Please join Sanjog Aul all next Wednesday at 7am Pacific Time, 9am Central Time and 10am Eastern Time for another hour of CIO Talk Radio on the Voice America Business Channel. CIO Talk radio is brought to you by HP and Siemens Smart Grid.
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