(US & Canada) VIDEO | Start Showing Value As Quickly As You Can — Giant Eagle EVP and CIO

Kirk Ball, EVP and Chief Information Officer at Giant Eagle, speaks with Ed Scott, CEO of ElectrifAi in a video interview about turning data into real business value, the role of data quality in AI, data management for smaller businesses, dealing with unstructured data, and showcasing value of data initiatives.

Giant Eagle is one of the largest privately owned enterprises in the United States comprised of freestanding pharmacies, convenience stores, and supermarkets.

Ball initiates the conversation by speaking about the difficulty of turning data into real business value across industries despite the practice being over a decade old. He explains that a part of the problem is the constantly increasing volume and velocity of data. It continues to evolve and become more sophisticated over time creating a perpetual learning cycle for data leaders.

He also highlights the lack of data governance --- understanding the data and effectively managing it so that it is ingested, cleansed, cataloged, categorized, and fit for gleaning insights.

When asked about the ideal approach for small companies towards managing data, Ball says that organizations do not always have all the expertise needed to handle the different aspects of data management. Therefore, they have to leverage vendors and understand their true capabilities. They also have to have a combination of internal and external talent while building the required skills in-house.

Next, Ball goes on to discuss the approach to dealing with unstructured data at Giant Eagle. He says that the teams catalog all the data regardless of the type, putting them in the right repositories. He further suggests having a catalog, a semantic layer for the data linking the sets and piecing different types of data together logically.

Sharing his views on value generation, Ball states that data teams need to start showing the value as quickly as they can as it builds trust and confidence in the organization. He further suggests creating a “value heat map” and identifying the effort required.

Ball further stresses that all the big problems do not have to be solved at once. Instead, it should be a mixture of a large problem and a few smaller ones that can start generating value right away.

CDO Magazine appreciates Kirk Ball for sharing his data insights with our global community.