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Juan Tello, Chief Data Officer, Deloitte

Describe your career to date

I have been in the data business for over 26 years, which at the time seemed to have little to no growth as you were either a data modeler or data base administrator; that quickly changed as data became the glue that connected organizations.  

I followed my passion and data to see what the data was telling us, which I later learned you can make the data tell and say whatever you want. Looking back across my career, what excites me the most is the growth of this profession; it is exciting to see the career model and future trajectory. When I started, the role of CDO did not exist and I feel honored to have been a small part of the movement that helped shape our overall profession. 

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

With all the technological advancements and modernization across the data value chain the biggest challenge is looking holistically across all data types (structure and unstructured) bringing together to drive greater business outcomes while managing and governing a more complex set of risk, legal, and ethical considerations.   

How are you developing the data literacy of a) your own organization and b) your clients? 

Our first step was to shift to a data as a product model that made it easier to find and use our data products. This led to end users asking what more can be done with this data, which gave us the mandate to develop an overall data fluency program consisting of a broad set of disciplines across business, data, technology, and storytelling.  

How are you preparing your organization and your clients for AI adoption and change management?  

It is an exciting time to see the advancements in AI capabilities which is elevating this into a core business capability, which is allowing us to take a holistic view at how and where AI can transform our business with a bias to changing the way we work.  

Once we understand what we want to change, the data capabilities that are required become a straightforward strategy. The one thing we have learned is to group use cases into personas as the commonality and reusability of the same data is very high. 

Juan Tello
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