Summary
It was great to learn about Kathleen’s journey to becoming a successful and respected data and analytics leader. As with most of our interviewees, she ended up in the data field via other disciplines and somewhat by accident. She also offers some very important advice for increasing diversity and inclusion, such as searching out women and people of color to ensure diversity in hiring. Publishing a role and assuming they may apply for it is not enough.
I really like Kathleen’s replacement of the commonly used Gartner Analytics Maturity curve with the concept of an ecosystem, rather than a linear path. Jason Widjaja raises a similar point, in that the business value that an analytics function drives is the measure of its maturity, not whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. Kathleen’s point is that descriptive/investigative analytics is always required – with a direct alignment to business needs – which translates to an ecosystem of different...