Does data now have a seat at the table during strategic discussions? If not, what will it take to get it there?
At N Brown data absolutely has a seat at almost every table. That’s not just my doing; it’s embedded in the culture of the company, which has been put in place by our CEO Steve Johnson. He has a vision for where the company is going and how it is going to use data to get there, and he has hired only people who have been the ability to achieve that goal through the use of data. So I would suggest that if this isn’t happening in companies, it is a cultural shift that has to come from the top. Hiring clever people and hoping they are going to change the company through the quality of their work alone is an incredibly difficult ask.
What are your key areas of focus for data and analytics in 2022?
When I was taught statistics and when I’ve taken courses in ML, data is almost always presented without context. That’s why one of the complaints from data science is that 90% of the job is cleaning and processing. The areas that I have focused on recently include data meshes, Bayesian models and causality. A common theme for these areas is the context in which data is produced and in which data is critical.
You can’t operate as a data science team in a vacuum, you have to understand the context of where the data has come from, what problems you have with the data, what you know about the systems that produce the data and the domains in which that data is being generated, as well as how people are going to use the information that you create. For that reason, I don’t think my focus is so much technical as cultural, putting data in context and building systems which operate effectively in those contexts.
Tell us what leadership means to you in the context of your role as a senior data leader.
No answer provided.
