Governing Body Spotlight

Kappu currently serves as the Chief Data and Analytics Officer at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine (SOM). She established a solid and scalable foundation to enable the delivery of accurate information to end users more dynamically, resulting in an organizational transformation towards a data-driven culture.

Prior to joining the SOM, Kappu worked at the MITRE Corporation serving as the trusted advisor to senior leaders of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), and Veterans Affairs (VA) in the implementation of systems engineering, business process engineering, and large scale IT acquisition projects and programs.

Kappu has led the development and implementation of large-scale software systems including ERP (SAP) implementation for financial organizations (Fidelity Investments and First Citizens Bank), and higher education and healthcare research institutions (Duke University, Duke Clinical Research Institute). Starting as a software developer, she has served in these institutions in various capacities including technical lead, business architect, and project and program manager.

She is passionate about creating high-performance teams with diverse backgrounds and skill sets and fostering a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, trust, teamwork, and high-quality customer service. She holds a bachelor’s in Physics from the University of Madras, India, a master’s in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati, and an MBA from Virginia Tech.

Kappu enjoys hiking and high-altitude mountain climbing with her family. She has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and a couple of other peaks in the Himalayas.

Learn more about leaders in the Washington, DC CDAO community here.
 

Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.

I started my career as a software developer and grew into various leadership positions of increasing scope and complexity over the several years. I strongly believe that functions such as Information Technology and Data Analytics should enable an organization to achieve its goals and be driven by its mission or business objectives. As a result, I have always attempted to understand organizational goals and objectives first and designed the data analytics strategy and governance around them.
 

What is one of your guiding leadership principles?

Building partnerships across the organization with stakeholders and connecting data to organizational outcomes are critical to enabling an organization to be data-driven to gain a competitive advantage. 
 

With disruption being a key theme of the past year, where do you see your role as a CDAO going in the next 1-2 years?

I see opportunities in adversities. While hiring and retaining talent has been a challenge in the past year, the need for being agile, flexible, and innovative has become more critical than ever before to sustain the demand with fewer resources.
 

What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the CDAO role?

Understand the goals of your leadership team and stakeholders. Build trust with your stakeholders by providing accurate data in a timely manner that will answer their key business questions to make data-driven decisions.
 

Tell us a few fun facts about yourself.

1. My family and I are into high-altitude mountain climbing. 
2. I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and a couple of other peaks in the Himalayas (~ 17800 ft.)

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