Todd Foley: Hello and welcome to the CDO Magazine interview series. I’mTodd Foley, Chief Digital Officer and CISO with Lydonia, an AI solutions company. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking withShruti Sharma, Data Delivery Team Leader for Analytics, Insights, and Automation at Philips. How do you keep your teams agile and walking that tightrope of productive dissent and decisive direction in the midst of what sometimes really is chaos?
Shruti Sharma: It is chaotic and the only thing that is constant is change. So, it sometimes actually helps to have a framework for your decisions, like, we chose this plan because of these constraints, and they were evaluated based on these criteria. Sometimes it helps to come up with rubrics for decision-making. And again, it comes back to creating visibility for it. And when people can understand where you’re coming from, they can forgive you as well when things don’t work out because you’re not in it to like make a grand plan or a grand splash. You’re really sharing your line of thought: this is how you evaluate, and based on this, that’s the decision you’ve taken. And it doesn’t have to be like a very exhaustive documentation around it. It can be a whiteboarding session. It can be like a one-on-one conversation. It could be scribbled on a blank piece of paper. But as long as you’re honest with yourself and with your teams, and some of that could be that, yes, there is a lot of ambiguity around this, but I’m placing my bet on this. So good, bad, ugly – that’s on me. And then, let’s see where we go with it. There are times when you’re not sure if this is going to be it.
Todd Foley: So, the idea there is, while you’re decisive, you provide transparency in that decision-making. You don’t give direction without some elements of why you’re going in that direction. And that’s kind of the key to not only being able to make the team effective in what they’re doing but also to pivot, right? If you need to in the future as well. And to be able to incorporate that productive dissent in a way where it doesn’t become a blocker. But we’ve been talking about this in the context of our teams, right? But really, this same thing applies for the consumers of your insight, your analytics as well. And I think one of the things we’ve focused on a lot in the past has been time to data, right? How can we more quickly put the right information in front of the business so they can make decisions? But sometimes those decisions aren’t very quick, even if the data is there. And I think there’s a gap we’re really focusing on these days, more so than we did historically, which is not just time to data but time to impact. Right. How do you look at that? How do you think about that gap between insight and impact?
Shruti Sharma: There’s a huge chasm between insight and impact. Most projects are littered in the valley somewhere. A lot of it comes from, I think, we get very excited about augmenting data without treating data as a proxy for underlying business processes. So, while you can make those insights, you can make those kinds of analytical bridges, so to say, you’ve got to map it all the way back to business processes. Those need to be corrected or augmented or edited or revamped because that’s what is generating the data. Usually, those kinds of projects fall through the cracks because in your exuberance to get to your insight, somewhere along that journey, you’ve left your business process partner behind. And so, they’re not on board. Whatever changes you are talking about are not on their roadmap. Often, as a data professional, because I can do things with code, I get overly excited about the changes that I can make without completely realizing the complexity of the physical world — what that change means on the shop floor, in a supply chain, and in a delivery process. So that’s the chasm between insight and impact. It’s extremely important to keep your partners together with you on that journey. And yes, the onus is still on you to persuade, provide the context, and talk about how important that is. But you can’t leave people behind. If you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together.
Todd Foley: Well said. I think it’s, I won’t say a common failing, but I think it’s very natural in the role as a data leader to focus only on those things that you can impact, right? To take a look at data quality and time to data. It’s very easy in that process, not just to lose the business context but also to lose the holistic vision that the data is coming from somewhere. You can solve data quality problems sometimes much easier at the source, through different solutions than you can through AI, analytics, or remediation techniques. Then you look at being able to provide the data in a more timely manner to the business and to enable those data-driven decisions more readily. At the same time, they may be using that data in a way that’s maybe less than optimal. Tying it actually into the process and the engagement the business has with their clients and their constituents is something that I think, in your role, being able to have that vision and then apply it to use the persuasion as you described is much more useful to the business than simply serving them data faster, right?
Shruti Sharma: Right. I mean, more data doesn’t mean more intelligence. More data doesn’t mean a greater impact. Appropriate data can do all of those things. In fairness, we’ve got to stay in a very interactive mode with the entire business around us because as the world is changing, so is our business. So are our business processes, and we need to be able to respond to that.
Todd Foley: You’re taking some ownership and responsibility here, not just for data but for understanding the business’s data understanding, right? Being able to increase that or influence it in a way where you do get better impact from your data, from your insights.
Shruti Sharma: It does. A fit is being very realistic about things that are within my control. So, I have a lot of control over my outlook, my learning path, and what I perceive as my responsibilities. I’ve got some level of influence over teams that I routinely and directly work with. Of course, less so as the whole chain kind of branches out. If I know more or if someone knows more, I think the onus of communicating that vision, communicating that idea, lies with me. Sometimes it’s going to be with my business partner because they know it, they see it, and then the onus of communication is on them to bring me along on that journey. It can only happen when we’ve got those open relationships where we are comfortable enough to disagree with each other because we know what we are working towards benefits the entire organization.
Todd Foley: So, those relationships and that partnership create the way you look at it. It creates additional responsibility for you and your teams, right? Because you’re being responsible, not just for the data but for the consumers of the data and their understanding of the data. Do you create unique products for different groups who might be at different levels of understanding or analytic capability?
Shruti Sharma: Absolutely, because you’ve got to meet people where they are in their analytic journey. For larger organizations, the ground reality is that when it comes to analytical maturity, it’s a mosaic. It’s not like the entire organization is at three or four, but there are pockets that are very analytically aware. They have those kinds of capabilities and ownership and knowledge to be able to make the leap and the jump, and then there are pockets that are less. So, you can’t cater to only one kind of audience. You’ve got to have products. If someone can interact with the dashboard, and they are comfortable doing that and that level of engagement, then that’s important. If there are teams that really want to build their own models or their own semantic layer, then you’ve got to be able to figure out a way that they are empowered to do that. So, of course, products have to be catered to your audience—not just subject matter but even analytical aptitude, realistically speaking.
Todd Foley: Thank you for joining me today. For those who are listening to this for more interviews and insights, please visit cdomagazine.tech. And Shruti, thank you. It’s truly been a pleasure.
Shruti Sharma: Thank you, Todd. Thanks so much.
