Navigating the Transition to Independence and Diverse Clientele

In Episode 30, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Sol Rashidi, Former Chief Data, Analytics & AI Officer at various Fortune 100 organisations and now advisor, where they discuss what really causes many of the Data & Analytics industry's challenges and the importance of perception, which includes;

• Starting out as a Data Engineer
• Being a translator before the translator skillset was recognised
• Being a techno-functional Data Executive
• Helping to launch IBM Watson
• Why you’re never brought in as a CDO when things are going well
• Why your value has nothing to do with what you can build
• Why success has nothing to do with your competence in the data space
• Why you’ve only got 6 months to build the perception of value as a Data Leader
• The framework of understanding what are common, core and local data challenges
• Putting wins on the board amongst conflicting agendas
• Over 70% of organisations don’t understand the value of a CDO yet
• The importance of asking your stakeholders what they think your job is
• Understanding who and what you should prioritise
• What we actually mean when we talk about 'good communication' and ‘getting out in the business’
• Why you need to create function-specific strategy documents for each key stakeholder
• The importance of talking in the language of your stakeholders
• Why you should always talk about their needs and requests
• Creating brand equity by ensuring your stakeholders feel heard and understood
• The catalyst for writing her best-selling book
• Having 40 AI deployments in production at in enterprise organisations
• The 3 key reasons why organisations change tact and don’t follow through
• Why data analytics work is the hardest to quantify in business
• The three measurements of value and ROI; financial, cultural and relevancy
• Landing different messages for different personas
• Why 60% of the day is committed to communication
• Why you presume that people know what you’re doing but they never do
• Why data and analytics people don’t get the correct training to be successful at the executive level
• Why it’s less about IQ and more about EQ, BQ and SQ
• Why you need to report to ‘the business’ if you want to be respected, but, why it’s easier to do the work under IT
• Why you’ll always be starting from a deficit in perception if you sit within IT  
• Why having responsibility is different to having the authority
• What the future of AI will look like
• Why they’ll be a decrease in the amount of AI-based projects over the next 12-24 months  

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