Data Leaders Doubling Down on Digital Transformation

Six weeks after the city of Houston issued their initial stay-home-work-safe order, the Houston Chief Data Officer community met to discuss digital transformation in the new era. During this virtual gathering, participants representing medium and large enterprises, as well as different industries, exchanged ideas and shared challenges on how the global crisis has influenced data and analytics ecosystems and opened doors to enable and accelerate digital transformation.

Last month, Evanta launched a survey to find out from leaders how COVID-19 is impacting their organizations. These are a few of the key findings:

39% are continuing standard business operations at a reduced level, up 3% from April

31% report a significant impact on organization’s revenue, down 18% from April

26% predict a high or extremely high impact on their organization’s budget, down 26% from April

65% expect to return to standard business operations in 3-12 months

The discussion was led by Marc Paige, AVP IT Software Development & Chief Applications Architect at GC Services; Sushma Bhan, Chief Data Officer - Wells and Development at Shell Oil Company; and Raphael Louvrier, Chief Data Officer - North America at Vallourec North America.  

Impact of Current Events on Data and Analytics

Although the executives serve different industries and are at different stages of their data and analytics program maturity, their organizations’ responses to the impacts of COVID-19 were quite similar. One essential step was prioritization. The current climate required leadership teams to revisit, evaluate and refocus the company's goals, strategies, or processes in order to meet their current operational needs. While some executives had to completely reshape their business priorities, others focused on streamlining their processes to build a better foundation for the future. 

Another critical step was communication and collaboration. Data and digitalization is at the very core of remote work and survival during this pandemic. Data and analytics leaders must align their strategies with those of the business. To do so, they need to improve their data literacy programs and increase the communication between themselves and other business units. To build a successful data and analytics strategy, they also need to understand the required business insights, develop user-friendly dashboards, and train non-technical users on how to find insights themselves.

A measure of success in 12-18 months would be an evident breakdown of business silos through the habitual exchange of information and development of long-lasting cross-departmental teams.

Balancing Increased Demand With Current Resources

While most industries are experiencing cuts to their resources, whether funding, human, or both, none are  experiencing a decrease for data and analytics. Teams are working diligently to deliver on the plethora of requests from all areas of the business. To do so, they must prioritize what projects take precedence over the others. 

During their evaluation process, the executives ask themselves: what can I deliver quickly? What will have the most impact on the organization? Does this request align with future projects and goals? Will this serve as a great interim solution until we can achieve the larger solution? This additional demand on the existing data and analytics resources demonstrates the increasing importance of data and analytics within the company to deliver business value to the organization. 

Team Empowerment and Creative Opportunities

With offices closed and employees forced to work from home, business units and team silos have begun to disintegrate, resulting in better understanding of the business, improved decision making, and empowered employees. As employees are more isolated at home, they are challenged to problem-solve and troubleshoot on their own. They must reach out to other business units for answers and host their own cross-departmental meetings to look for solutions. Collaboration tools have made it faster and easier for employees to organize these meetings with anyone around the world. 

While this autonomy is empowering executives to do more with less, data security and information risk management is of major importance. Depending on the organization’s security structure, one item to consider is educating employees on risk management and risk appetite. Some companies have found that data quality and trust support risk mitigation efforts by allowing the organization to move away from a more controlled security infrastructure.

by CDAOs, for CDAOs

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