Todd Foley: Hello, and welcome to the CDO Magazine interview series. I’m Todd Foley, CDO and CISO with Lydonia. Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Karima Zahrir, Director of Data Analytics and AI at Louisiana Pacific Corporation. Karima, you clearly have a lot on your plate. You have initiatives to move to a new simplified architecture. You’re working across data analytics and AI, you’re engaged not only in continual education and advancement and enablement for your teams to keep pace with technology, but you’re also focused on business enablement. How do you help your teams prioritize those things? And how do you prioritize those things? Do you ever sleep?
Karima Zahrir: Ah, sleep. What a cherished friend. I do sleep. I do, but honestly, all this work is keeping us on our toes for sure. But like you said, it’s all about prioritizing. And having an incredible team that shares the load is definitely helping us in this area. Our leaders, our team, they understand that we cannot put everything at once, so we are working very closely with them, identifying what’s most important to us, and focusing on delivering step by step. Nirvana is not going to be, we’re not going to get there. I truly believe in phased approaches. So, I think we’re taking it step by step, and we’re really making an impact, and we can see it and measure it right there.
Todd Foley: Yeah, so sort of a step-by-step approach. Are there other strategies that you’ve found effective in balancing the adoption of cutting-edge technology with the need to keep processes simple and efficient?
Karima Zahrir: Absolutely. I believe that one of the things we’re doing here at Louisiana Pacific is partnering with our business leaders very early on to understand that process and look at the solution that could help without tons of customization. That’s for sure one of the areas that we’re focusing on. The second one, like I said, is a phased approach. I appreciate the perfectionists, but we need to move forward as fast as possible in this fast-paced world, and the best way to do that is to be agile and pursue a phased approach that’s going to show the value and let people ask for more and maybe adjust their needs based on what they see. Another area is listening. Listening to your business leaders, their pain points, their challenges, and their ambition is very important. That way, it will help you readjust your strategy. And that’s what we’ve been doing within IT. And obviously, the other area is making sure that we keep up with the technology. So, training, like I said, is very important. Tapping into the new talent within the business, especially with Gen Z coming in, all those tech-savvy folks, it’s very important to include some. And the last thing I would say is, as an IT organization, make sure we have a robust governance and security because it is real. It’s a real threat. So, it’s great to do innovation, just not forgetting the security with it.
Todd Foley: There are a number of things there, and I’d love to ask you some questions about them if you don’t mind. You talked about business value and making sure that it’s obtained in definition, and I definitely see that as an area that our colleagues often struggle with. I’m curious as to how you sort of quantify, if you do, that business value, and as you’re doing prioritized work, how you speak to stakeholders and speak to the people who are determining the final budget about those kinds of things. And I do want to poke, too, at the Gen Z mention as well. I think that’s always a good one.
Karima Zahrir: Well, that’s a great question. There are so many facets to that. I know one of the hardest things for data and analytics is to quantify that business value. And the way we really go about it is identifying the business goals. What are the business goals? Try to translate those into the metrics that are important for the business to make sure that they review to check if their business is successful or not, and then take those metrics and break them down for each function and area that would translate into the data that’s needed to actually support those metrics. And as we advance with each area, and we’re able to give the insight to look at those metrics and make sure that we have solid data that they can rely on. That’s really my way of measuring, but we’re able to successfully make an impact within the data and analytics.
Todd Foley: That makes sense, right? If you have the right KPIs and the business agrees on the metrics, and you’re measuring it, you have good data quality on your value, then the work you do around data and driving better data-driven decision-making and time to data is going to be able to be measured, prioritized, and validated properly as well. So the short answer is data. Is that right?
Karima Zahrir: A hundred percent. It is really the new oil, like they say. I know we’re looking at renewable energy, but for now, what’s fueling any organization is their data, after their people and their products. It’s really their most important asset. And if they know the metrics that they can get out of this data, and they make sure at the foundation their data is captured properly, I think those companies are going to definitely take the leap over the rest of the others.
Todd Foley: You said something positive about the Gen Z members of your team, how tech-savvy they are. And while I’ve certainly heard the traditional sort of generational railing against kids these days and what they do and how they do it, the reality is, people of that generation are not only tech-savvy but they’re undaunted by technology, right? And they have a more intuitive, I think, understanding of the possibilities of applying technology and an expectation that it’s going to be available to them the same way it is, as a consumer of data in the general marketplace outside of an organization. Do you see that? And how do you take that value, that potential, and turn it into value for Louisiana Pacific?
Karima Zahrir: That’s a great question, and actually, that’s a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart. It was the citation I used when I did my Master’s in IT leadership is how Generation Z was going to revamp the actual work environment and especially within the IT arena. And we are witnessing that right now. You did mention the Gen Z within my group. They’re not just within my group. That’s the beauty of it. They’re everywhere, embedded everywhere within the business. And having them understand their business processes and being able to use all these tools and technologies to show value for their leaders, it’s helping us tremendously, to show the value and tap into innovation opportunities. So, I’m really excited for that.
Todd Foley: Thank you, Karima, for joining us today. For those listening, please visit cdomagazine.tech for additional interviews. Thank you.
Karima Zahrir: Thank you.
