Headline Partner

Anusha Dandapani, Chief, Data and Analytics Services Section, United Nations International Computing Centre

Anusha Dandapani’s path to power

Dandapani serves as the chief data and analytics officer at the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC). In this role, she is responsible for creating and overseeing the growth of data and analytics services for UNICC. Anusha advises and partners with other UN organizations, industry and academia on solving their business problems by leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, data engineering, data science offerings and capabilities.

Previously, Dandapani was a data science lead at Barclays, where she led several strategic initiatives related to electronic surveillance and financial crime compliance. She was responsible for end-to-end management from requirements to working with the program management and collaborating with data scientists and machine learning teams for delivery. Dandapani has been working in the financial services industry since 2004.

Dandapani is passionate about educating young students and she has led several STEM initiatives in London, New York and Pune. Most recently, she conceived and led an ideation workshop for students to apply data science to tackle food waste in schools – in partnership with ITU @ United Nations and NYC Mayor’s Office for International Affairs.   

What stage has your organization reached on its data maturity journey?

Moderate maturity level: with analytics, support services (framework and maturity assessments for other client UN agencies, administration, infrastructure, data setup) and data management, for data warehouse, data integration, platform consolidation, migration and hosting, data quality management, master data management, metadata management, data analysis, data-as-a-service, data catalogue and security management.

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

As the technology shared services hub for the UN, UNICC implements the UN SG’s data strategy across the UN system. UNICC offers services including consulting and maturity assessments, implementation and analytics capabilities, on multiple technology platforms that support fact-based decision making.

The data team is over 34 people working from UNICC offices in Brindisi and Rome, Italy, Geneva, Switzerland, Valencia, Spain and New York, USA, as well as in Gaza with UNRWA. We have staff from over 20 countries working remotely and with clients the world over, from New York and Paris to Ethiopia, Hungary, Malaysia the Philippines and Spain.

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organization and on the industry as a whole?

UNICC is well-positioned to assist UN agencies in implementing their alignments to the UN SG data strategy and take their data programs to the next level with humanitarian use cases, in the areas of analytics, advanced analytics, data management and data exchange as well as data governance.

UNICC supports agencies with a cost recovery model, so one aspect of challenges is the cost to implement transformation of data programs and approaches. The other is the natural siloes that occur in the UN ecosystem, where interdependence and interoperability of data sharing has to be weighed against privacy, confidentiality and accountability.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?

UNICC’s data strategy is aligned to the UN Secretary-General’s Data Strategy, with data projects and platforms that leverage the insight, impact and integrity of the forward-looking UN plan, helping to ensure that all UN agencies have meaningful analytics on organizational performance and delivery.

With a problem-driven approach, we will build the capabilities and organizational enablers we need to unlock the UN’s data potential. Every use case will be an opportunity to add value and learn.

Anusha Dandapani
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