(US & Canada) VIDEO | Customer Service Is a Key Differentiator for Vendors — Ohio Health-Data Engineering and Visual Analytics Director

Krishna Tummalapalli, Director of Data Engineering and Visual Analytics at Ohio Health, speaks with PJ Weidner, District Sales Manager for OH, KY, IN, and WV at Pure Storage, in a video interview about understanding emerging product capabilities, customer service as a key differentiator, the data analytics roadmap, and the role of leaders in finding the right way while embracing tools and technologies.

Tummalapalli begins the discussion by underlining the need to understand the capabilities of newly emerging products and positioning those capabilities against the organizational need. He adds that it is necessary to look at it from the functionality perspective and ensure that multiple applications aren't doing the same thing.

Next, Tummalapalli highlights the role of customer service as an important differentiator of products. He says that only users with technology expertise can use a product with minimal support. Further, he asserts that customer service will be a key differentiator.

To support the statement, Tummalapalli refers to the customer service provided by AWS in comparison with others in the domain. He believes that helping customers quickly understand the capabilities and implementing those is another challenge that needs to be assessed while selecting products.

When asked about the data management and analytics roadmap, Tummalapalli asserts that healthcare is an industry where data-driven decisions are made on a day-to-day basis. However, the challenge remains in figuring out the right way to generate intelligence out of the data and put it back into operations.

According to Tummalapalli, the organizational vision is to embrace data-driven decision-making capabilities, taking different functional areas and understanding their business decisions. Thereafter, enabling data to make better decisions, creating a roadmap, putting together an execution plan, and delivering that is the journey that lies ahead.

Reflecting on the transition from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics, to generative analytics, Tummalapalli considers generative AI and predictive analytics to be game-changers. The challenge, he opines, lies in figuring out the right way to embrace them.

Adding on, Tummalapalli states that the organizational leadership is primarily focused on assessing the right time to use descriptive analytics and the use cases for generative analytics. It is crucial to embrace these capabilities and incorporate them into a workflow on decision-making. To do that, it is necessary to educate teams at all, he adds.

Moving forward, Tummalapalli acknowledges the smartness of the internal physicians and states that they challenge IT teams in terms of capabilities. He maintains that the staff is on point with exploring and learning about the product capabilities of different vendors to stay relevant.

Concluding, Tummalapalli affirms that the onus then falls on the leaders such as CDOs and CDAOs to assess the organizational strategy to embrace the tools and technologies. He says that the leaders are trying to leverage the expertise of the subject matter experts to understand their requirements to provide better solutions in return.

CDO Magazine appreciates Krishna Tummalapalli for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.