1. Sanjeevan Bala, group chief data and AI officer, ITV
Describe your career to date
I broadly describe my career in four phases:
- Management and strategy consulting: Spending time in America and Asia Pacific in consulting firms gave me a strong foundational set of skills that I’ve developed as part of a toolkit. You learn to shift contexts across industries, spot patterns that cross over and take a more holistic approach to creating growth opportunities.
- Entrepreneurship, start-ups and scale-ups: Working in scrappy, funded start-ups and scale-ups broadened my expertise as you need to traverse every aspect of a business. Leading highly diverse, cross functional teams, there’s no playbook to follow, so you learn to assimilate information quickly and evolve your approach to what you are seeing in the market. The entrepreneurial opportunity to scale across multiple territories in months, develops skills in agility and adaptability. Constantly iterating and evolving how you operate. You develop a “delusionally optimistic” mindset and become skilled at focusing on where the market is going compared to where the market is today.
- Client side: I learned to develop compelling visions and strategies but also to have direct responsibility for delivery. My experience in consulting and scale-ups helped tremendously, but perhaps the biggest learning from this phase is the value of executive and board storytelling to help create consensus and take people on the journey. The industry often talks about digital literacy, but I think it’s far more important that transformational professionals hone their business literacy and are able to communicate and operate with the executive committee and boards. After all, securing funding is one thing, carefully sequencing and managing expectations is another skill needed to successfully pull off a transformation.
- Advisory and NED: Sitting on a FTSE board provides you with a 10,000ft view of a business and a more nuanced understanding of the increasingly complex stakeholder ecosystem businesses operate in. These last two phases have helped refine purpose and the need to develop next generation talent.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
We are very much at the start of this journey across the group. As we iteratively roll out the strategy, we are seeing pockets of greater maturity in areas such as digital marketing or digital sales teams. We have avoided a one size fits all approach and instead calibrated and adjusted to meet the business units where they are today.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
The unit will have over 200 roles by the end of 2023 and consists of:
- Data product ownership (data strategy): Storytelling the art of the possible and driving the organisational culture change. Influencing the business to deliver an offensive strategy with data, one that delivers stakeholder growth and moves away from “faster horses”.
- Data governance: Supporting and enabling the business to own and govern how data is used to create value and manage risks. The team focuses on a value “carrot” approach to how to govern data compared to a compliance “stick”
- Data architecture: Developing enterprise wide understanding to enable greater value to be realised by exposing and surfacing untapped (data) assets across the organisation.
- Data experimentation: Driving the change to bring about the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop, a team consisting of analysts and dashboarding experts. The key with this team is to help the business commit to an “action”, compared to delivering visually engaging data that “looks good”.
- Data innovation: Responsible for reducing time to business value; a team consisting of data platform, ML engineering, data engineering, QA, data scientist. The focus is on privacy by design, value by design and security by design, baked in at the outset. Additionally, the team focuses on ongoing development, onboarding new technology that can reduce time to business value and ultimately avoiding the need to refactor the platform.
Our team is spread out regionally across the UK and reports into the management board at ITV.
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