Driven by Data: The Podcast

In Episode 25, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Irina Mihai, Director of Data, Marketing Analytics & Decision Science at Adidias, where they discuss how to create an environment to ensure that the work of a D&A team is constantly visible, which includes;

• Coming from a non-STEM background and dealing with imposter syndrome
• The importance of branding the Data & Analytics team both internally and externally
• Having an internal decision-support culture
• The benefits of authentic leadership
• The importance of how to decide on which problems to work on
• Intentionally building a team to cater for areas where you have less experience
• Choosing the right KPIs to monitor performance
• Moving from being an individual contributor into a leadership role
• Ensuring you’re not a bottleneck for your team
• The importance of defining your team's purpose within the organisation
• Fostering an environment of psychological safety
• Why you should co-create your roadmap as a team
• The importance of having designated leads for each item of your roadmap as a team
• Why communication skills separate the good from the excellent
• Having a criteria to prioritise what projects to undertake
• Understanding the organisational strategic goals
• Knowing when and why to discontinue a project
• The benefits of having an organisational culture where challenge is welcome
• The importance of having an agreed model of communication to engage effectively with stakeholders
• Why the engagement and commitment of stakeholders is a key evaluation criteria
• The benefits both internally and externally of making sure your D&A team is visible
• Why you can no longer rely on the company brand to attract talent
• Why everyone needs to be responsible for their own visibility

In Episode 24, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Chris Bannocks, Group Chief Data Officer at QBE Insurance, where they discuss how they are productionising GenAI use cases from scratch within 8 weeks, which includes;

• Being a CDAO/Group CDAO in multiple organisations/sectors
• The importance of international experience
• Being allergic to the term ‘data strategy’
• The impact that Gen AI will have on business
• Why GenAI/AI isn’t the solution to every problem
• Harnessing the value that GenAI can bring
• The top and bottom line opportunities of GenAI
• Why GenAI raises the stakes further for D&A teams
• The requirements of the semantic understanding of your data organization
• Going fast and hard on one opportunity to prove it could be done
• Using different mediums to gather 300 potential use cases
• Building things to be reusable and scalable
• Measuring the addressable opportunity
• Why they didn’t have to quantify the value before they got started
• Standing up a technical spike within 6 days to show what could possibly be done
• Having a 12 week deadline to get it done from a standing start with no capability
• How that capability has now reduced time to production to 8 weeks
• The collaboration needed with each leader from different business units
• The importance of creating a working product in production
• Why they avoided focusing on efficiency and focused on increasing revenue instead
• Avoiding enthusiastic experimentation
• Why tight deadlines helped to make decisions quickly and focus on scope/MVP
• Why you should never start a piece of work without input from business stakeholders
• The challenge of ethical and bias considerations
• How they tackled GenAI education across the organisation
• The importance of having a human in the loop
• Building a team that can deliver
• Top pieces of advice for anyone about to embark on this journey

In Episode 23, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Caroline Zimmerman, Director of Data Product & Strategy at Profusion, where they discuss the research study she helped to conduct into how private equity companies are leveraging Data & AI to fuel growth and enterprise value, which includes;

• The catalyst for conducting the research study
• Why private equity has a very specific definition of value and how to measure it
• Why PE has a lot to teach the corporate Data & Analytics landscape
• The major differences between PE-backed firms and the rest when it comes to D&A
• Focusing on enterprise value
• Why time horizons are important and can create urgency with long-term thinking
• The differences between PE Data Leaders and others
• Why PE does ‘BI’ but not in the traditional sense
• The power of growth modelling and the relationship with investment/capital allocation
• The role of Data & Digital in value creation teams
• The career opportunities for Data Leaders in PE
• The two key ways that PE firms are using Data & Analytics across their portfolio
• Obsessing over understanding your most valuable customers
• Culture is still the main challenge to overcome
• The differences between PE firms who specialise versus those with diversified portfolios
• Why data monetisation affects multiple and not just profit
• Why horizontal investments into data infrastructure don’t exist in PE
• Why the D&A community should care about this research
• Why it still should be all about making better decisions
• Roles, titles and remuneration benchmarks of Data Leaders within PE
• Where you can find/access the research study

​A joint INSEAD research project by:

• ​Theodoros Evgeniou, INSEAD Business School
• ​Caroline Zimmerman, Profusion
• ​Olly Blaydon, Armstong International
• ​Shahbaz Alam, AWS

In Episode 22, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Simon Ferriter, CEO at Anmut , where they discuss why organisations are valuing their data like other balance sheet assets, which includes;

• The framework for measuring the value and fitness for purpose of your most important data
• The role of capital allocation in data assets
• How most organisations don’t understand which data assets are important to success
• If data teams lack the business/management acumen to communicate data effectively
• Why data isn’t treated or managed like other resources and assets in an organisation
• Not all data has equal importance to decision-making
• Why the 80-20 rule is likely in play when it comes to data
• Why data valuation is completely context-dependent
• The three financial methods for valuing data
• The importance of social impacts of data (environmental and community)
• The benefit of putting a financial figure on the value of data assets
• Why semantics around language are causing confusion
• Why the financial figure isn’t the end result, it’s what that allows you to do from there
• Why data valuation drives improved "value"
• Knowing which data asset is important for which business opportunities
• Why valuing your data captures the attention of the board and makes it their issue too
• The under-investment in data management capability and the overinvestment in technology
• Why the problem statements are fairly universal across industries and organisations
• Why complexity means intangible assets are overlooked and often undervalued
• Why accounting standards are no longer fit for purpose in the digital age of today
• If data should be on the balance sheet
• Investing in the upstream business process to prevent the need for new tools
• The benefits that organisations are seeing from valuing their data assets
• Why Anmut launched a product to help organisations to self-serve on this process

In Episode 21, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, we're airing the live interview that took place between Kyle Winterbottom and Ranil Boteju, Group Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Lloyds Banking Group which was recorded at the end of 2023 and then transcribed into 'Exclusive Leader Feature' article in the first edition of the Driven by Data Magazine, where they discuss how analytics practitioners are at the heart of value creation at LBG, which includes;

• The power of purpose
• Evolving views of value creation
• The future of analytics skills & value creation
• The potential and pitfalls of Generative AI
• Fostering a data culture
• Building an intentionally different team
• Whether the CDAO role will exist in 5 years

**Read the magazine here; https://orbitiongroup.com/driven-by-data-magazine-home/