Charles Southwood, regional vice-president and general manager, Northern Europe and Africa, Denodo Technologies

What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role? 

Over the years I have found many of the attributes that came from my early years in engineering have also been helpful when looking at the logical and analytical approaches needed for solving customer business problems using data and technology, and to the efficient operation of a sales and marketing business. Alongside this, I see important soft skills, including teamwork, empowerment, support, empathy, recognition and transparency.

What level of data maturity do you typically encounter across your client base and what tends to hold this back? 

Inevitably there is a wide spectrum of data maturity in most industries. While the attributes we might use to measure that maturity needs to be consistent across different sectors, it is interesting to note just how frequently the inhibitors are likewise, similar. Traditionally, IT departments have been the custodians of data, responsible for the integrity, reliability, security and performance. To remain competitive, however, the business is asking for greater insights through the aggregation of data from a broader range of data sources, for more real-time data, and for the ability to self-serve through agile BI at the business level.

The more data-mature companies are already awake to the realisation that continually moving and copying vast amounts of data repeatedly across the enterprise, (through operation data stores, data warehouses, data lakes, and data marts) is adding unnecessary cost and complexity, not reducing it. Instead, these innovators are taking a logical approach to data management, powering their solutions with data virtualisation. It is allowing rapid real-time access to all sources without moving and copying it.

The system then only abstracts what is needed, when it is needed. This vastly reduces the compute, the storage and most importantly the complexity, bringing real business agility for new insights and the ability to create new products and services in a fraction of the time that it might otherwise take using old batch ETL/data warehousing paradigms.