(US & Canada) VIDEO | CDOs Are Being Seen From a Business Lens Now — Bread Financial Head of Data Management, Protection, and Governance

Sanjay Saxena, Head of Data Management, Protection, and Governance at Bread Financial, speaks with Laurissa Krishock, Strategic Account Executive at OneTrust, in a video interview about the changing role of Chief Data Officers, advice to new data practitioners, driving analytic capabilities, the analytics journey, and bringing business units together to align with data and organizational goals.

Bread Financial is a tech-forward financial services company offering simple, personalized payment, lending, and saving solutions.

Shedding light on the changing leadership roles, Saxena states that roles like CDO were created based on organizational regulatory needs after the financial crisis. That is when disciplines such as enterprise data governance and data management gained importance, he adds.

Thereafter, with the upsurge of AI and ML, the first transformation happened with the introduction of CDO roles on the business side instead of the technology side.

In terms of evolution, the CDO role has driven past regulatory initiatives, states Saxena. Now the CDO engages more in strategic planning and evolving the digital and data strategy based on overall organizational strategy, he says.

Further, such leadership roles are now getting aligned to the senior leadership levels, within the organization, notes Saxena. He maintains that the board’s increased awareness around data and digital contributes to the evolution of the role.

Saxena affirms that CDOs are being highlighted from a business perspective now. He states that the biggest evident shift is the broader acceptance of having a business-led data organization.

When asked to advise new CDOs, Saxena states that the most important thing is to understand the problems afflicting the company and how they relate to data. He further advises practitioners to talk to stakeholders across the company and assess the most important challenges to resolve.

Instead of rushing into assumptions, Saxena implores practitioners to understand the data and its operational, analytical, regulatory, and management aspects. Secondly, he stresses the need for strategic investment by building a solid comprehensive data strategy with funding for the role, tools, and technology.

Next, Saxena states that it boils down to solving business problems, therefore, the practitioners must address business audiences, and be driven to solve business use cases.

Moving forward, he highlights analytics as another tool to make an organization data-driven. While executives across the board are used to making decisions based on experience and gut feeling, analytics is the science of utilizing data to make effective decisions.

Additionally, Saxena recalls how he built analytic capabilities in his previous roles and recommends starting with the use cases that demonstrate value quickly. He suggests working with the business leaders to establish such use cases and then introducing the right tools, technologies, and algorithms to ensure its materialization.

In addition, Saxena affirms the need for a good team of people, who can write reports from a historical perspective and can comprehend the business. Further, he adds that businesses must understand the current state before starting future projections.

While predicting outcomes, existing data is utilized for the future, and organizations must take the business use cases and assess the analytics required to generate insights from the data.

According to Saxena, the three critical parts of the analytics journey are:

1. Engagement of the business and proper business use cases

2. Being able to try out the smaller use cases and show results

3. A good team that can then take on the more complex aspects of the problem-solving

Furthermore, bringing together business units to align on data initiatives and organizational goals stems from the strategy, he says. Elaborating, Saxena says that there are two kinds of business users, the early adopters and the others who take time to grasp and appreciate the value.

In conclusion, he recommends solving the immediate issues of the early adopters and advocates taking a bottom-up approach, seeding the organization with use cases and success stories. Then, he asserts bringing the bigger strategy into play.

CDO Magazine appreciates Sanjay Saxena for sharing his insights with our global community.