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Vijoy Basu, Senior Director, Data and Analytics, Cognizant

Vijoy Basu, Senior Director, Data and Analytics, Cognizant

Vijoy Basu’s path to power

Basu is an experienced digital technology leader with 23+ years of global cross-business experience in leading digital transformation, data and analytics initiatives and large-scale global programs. Basu is passionate about ’bringing data to life’ by creating actionable insights that predict and optimise business outcomes. He has built and implemented enterprise-wide IT, data and analytics platforms that transform data at scale into intelligence. Currently Basu is the global head for the AI and analytics IT team at Cognizant which is a $20B, Fortune 200 company, where his role involves empowering people who power the business with decision intelligence. Basu has earlier worked at GE for 16+ years in five different GE business units and is a graduate of GE’s world-famous information management leadership program. Basu is a regular speaker at leading D&A conferences and has also spoken at Ivy colleges. He is the recipient of NEXT100 CIO, CIO100 Leader awards and has also been awarded multiple CEO and CIO awards in his career. Basu is also yoga certified teacher and in his spare time he loves to read books.

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

We have benchmarked as per Gartner’s D&A maturity framework and we are at below levels:

Level 3 for create and maintain semantic models, visual dashboards and advanced analytics models.
Level 4 for create and maintain enterprise reports.

Our aim is to be at level 4 by 2024.

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

Lead a global data and analytics team of 171 resources comprising of data analysts, business analysts, visualization engineers, solution architects, data scientists and machine learning engineers.

Team is overall 52% diverse (gender diversity) with ~27% women managers.

Team is spread across US, Canada and India locations.

We build and manage 185+ dashboards with 91K+ unique users and 10.7M+ annual hits. Have deployed over five enterprise-wide AI use cases.

We report into the CTO organization and the CTO reports into the CEO.

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?

AI becoming more mainstream with generative AI and the accompanying risks, legal, ethical issues surrounding it. New business models and skills will evolve.

Enhanced interest and focus from employees, shareholders and customers on ESG/sustainability technology – data will have a pivotal role to play here.

Companies are not culturally built for this exponential pace of change which is underpinned by the explosion of AI powered by synthetic data and will need to learn to keep up and lead in some cases just to survive or thrive.

If companies miss the signals and trends of data driven disruption, they may never recover in time and very soon will become extinct.

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?

Vision ’data driven insights, analytics driven decisions’ combining human intelligence with data intelligence to enable business outcomes at clock speed.

Our three pillars are:

Data is a business and enterprise asset.

Single version of truth from c-suite to the edge.

Building trust on the data.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organization, particularly with regard to data quality?

Yes, data quality (DQ) has been a journey and we have made significant progress:

Track and publish DQ KPIs and metrics (completeness, conformity, consistency, accuracy and uniqueness).

Analyze the DQ scores, perform RCA on data discrepancies and propose DQ Improvement changes.

Implement system enhancements and process changes to improve DQ.

Vijoy Basu
has been included in:

100 Enablers 2023 (USA)

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

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