Michael Fillios
Founder & CEO
IT Ally
Artera Services CDAO : CDOs Can Be From All Backgrounds But Business Acumen Is a Must-have
Balaram Tidhi
Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Arterra Services
Michael Fillios
Founder & CEO
IT Ally
Balaram Tidhi
Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Arterra Services
In this insightful episode of the CDO Magazine interview series, host Michael Filios, CEO of IT Ally, sits down with Balaram Tidhi, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Artera Services. Tidhi delves into the multifaceted nature of the CDO role, emphasizing that while individuals from diverse backgrounds can step into this position, possessing strong business acumen is non-negotiable. They discuss the rapid technological advancements in the industry, from AI to chatbots, and the importance of staying updated. Tidhi also highlights the significance of change management, offensive and defensive strategies, and the need for effective negotiation skills. The conversation touches upon the future of AI, the role of government in setting guidelines, and the exciting developments in open-source foundation models. The episode wraps up with a discussion on the potential of conversational AI in project management, especially in predicting risks.
Transcript
Michael Fillios
Hello, and welcome to the CDO magazine interview series. I am Michael Fillios, founder and CEO of IT Ally and a CDO editorial board member. And we are partnering with CDO magazine, MIT CDOIQ and the International Society of Chief Data Officers in a series of interviews. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Balaram Tidhi, Vice President, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Artera Services. Balaram, welcome to the program.
Balaram Tidhi
Great to be here. Thank you Michael.
Michael Fillios
So as we think about your experiences, and we’ve done these interviews with a lot of different people that come from different backgrounds, right, But when you think about it, what kinds of skills or qualities do you think makes up for a modern CDO or analytics officer and how do you go about developing those skills to be successful?
Balaram Tidhi
That’s a great question. And it’s a multifaceted role, right? That’s why it is so hard to define it. And being CDOs people come from various backgrounds. It’s not like technologies like on the secondary, right. It’s all about change management. There’s a whole concept offensive and defensive, right? Like which path you’re going to take. It’s the creative piece of it. And understanding, keeping up to speed with the technologies out there is also equally important. Business acumen is also important because we want to make sure that we are aligned to the business. You need to understand the financial metrics, you need to understand some of the time, value of money or some of the key things that is required, not just technical. So that’s the reason you would see varied people coming to evolving into this CDR role. So to define like it is a particular skill, no, but at a very high level, I would say definitely some business acumen. The second one would be a change management skills, definitely leadership and keeping up to date with trends. And most of all is the communication and the negotiation skills that everyone has. So one of the critical path is definitely the negotiation skills. So how can you negotiate anyone, like maybe a bank robber, how do you negotiate him to surrender? Right? So it’s almost like negotiating somebody to show their dirty data laundry. So if you can do that can be a component. So at least these are the top things that comes to my mind. Of course, being humble.
Michael Fillios
Sure. And now you’ve got at least at the undergrad level, people coming out with these degrees that are specialized, right? So now you’ve got almost a technical skill set, but like you said, you can’t underestimate some of the other qualities that go along with that technical skill set in any leadership position. And certainly one like this that’s changing very rapidly and to that point you touched upon it. But gosh, there’s so much change going on in the industry at large when we look at Tech. But specifically, certainly AI and Chat GPT, and all of these techs have become mainstream. And they’re being adopted at rapid paces far greater than I’ve ever seen in my 30 years in the business. So what do you do to stay abreast of these trends and making sure that you’re in tune with the marketplace as it evolves?
Balaram Tidhi
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much of wealth. So nowadays I’m practicing speed reading because I don’t think I have enough time to read all the good content that comes out. But I do follow some folks in Twitter and some of the podcasts. I like the podcasts of the Super Data Science is an excellent podcast that brings some good leaders and also like the Data Chief is another one. So I have a list if folks are interested, just DM me and I can share all the podcasts that I feel like really adding me value. And of course there are some blogs out there I do follow. But podcasts are I live in Atlanta so when you’re stuck in the traffic you cover a lot of ground, right?
Michael Fillios
And, of course, CDO magazine. I’m sure is.
Balaram Tidhi
Absolutely. Yeah. And not to forget it’s more about the community is like having these like minded folks like a tribe, right? It has been like a source for just so many folks in this multifaceted skill set one place. It’s very hard to find that this is yeah, I took it for granted. So yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that.
Michael Fillios
So let’s imagine you’re traveling, you’re on a flight and sitting next to you is an aspiring young professional and you tell them more about what you do and they say, what do you think? What advice would you give me if I wanted to pursue that career? What would be your answer?
Balaram Tidhi
For a CDO career? My answer would be like depends on where he’s standing in his career. If he is all technical path, there is a different route from technical side if on the stats side of the fence or the business side or even people who are like behaviors or communication experts. So anyway, it’s open to anybody depending on the professional, the individual’s background. It’s not like you take a certificate kind of if you’re technical that is a different path towards it. Ultimately data is the least common denominator of any businesses that you have and how do you get there. So my advice would be like depending on because I do get this from my students, they do ask reach out to me as a mentoring. So depending on where they stand, we could provide them all these will lead if you have the intent to make an impact with business and data so you can take different paths to get there. So if they say I’m a technology guy, it’s what specifically I should do? If a technical track, I can say okay, three things important is like do you know SQL, do you know Python? Do you know some cloud computing? So if these three things are there, that’s enough for them to start playing with the Kaggle data sets. There’s so much of material, so much of learning people are ready to offer. But your SQL is there forever. It will be there for next 20 days, 20 years I guess then Python is the programming X programming language and of course the cloud. So these won’t be my top buckets and then you build on top of it.
Michael Fillios
Sure. I’m sure you saw the news Apple with this new AR coming out. When you think about the future of AI and Data and all of this, what are your steps to ensure that the company is staying relevant? I’m not sure if you guys are earlier adopters or fast followers, but how do you stay relevant in this ever changing space and keep on the forefront of these advancements?
Balaram Tidhi
That’s an excellent and a complex question, but to attempt to answer that as you see, you know, the seriousness of this is when Microsoft Chief or Google Chief comes in and says that we need some kind of controls and guidelines asking the government to do it. So it’s literally a game changing event that we are witnessing. Right. So just the hardware improvements and the software, the combination and the computing power and all the transformers, that the generative AI and open source. I am blown away by the kind of developments that are happening in the open source side, especially the foundation models. I don’t know if you heard about this open source Cerberus. It’s like a hardware and software combination and that’s again, just listening to these guys, the kind of knowledge they have and just going behind building these foundation models with less and less parameters has been phenomenal. For me to ask your question to stay behind it. I’m just now like a kid in the candy store. Like you don’t know what candy to eat. I’m super excited. The same time, how to bring value to the business, trying to apply it to our project management skill area. Because on construction it’s important that if they have like a six or eight month project of laying pipe underground, we need to know when to predict certain variables in there. Right. So we want to not a typical KPIs but also sync and generative AI can help us in suggesting remediations for the risks that they experience or making it easier for these project managers to address the issues rather than slicing and dicing and going into different reports. Right. There are like any number of possibilities. We are experimenting one of that model which would enable project manager to quickly come and type in the project number. It tells you, is my project at risk? And you can actually have like a chat bot type of a conversation.
Michael Fillios
Right? I was going to ask you about this like conversational AI basically.
Balaram Tidhi
So it tells your project risk, then what can I do? And you can tell like three or four remediations, right? So if he’s a new project manager, he can live on the tribal knowledge of the previous project managers. And we want to give also a networking effect for this. Like weather. Weather is such an important component for our delays and revenues of productivity. Weather ERP data. So having that collectively, can we provide inputs quickly for project managers?
Michael Fillios
Very good. Well, I should end with is there anything else? We covered a lot of ground here and always the time goes by quickly. Balaram, is there anything else you’d like to share before we wrap up that we haven’t talked about?
Balaram Tidhi
I think we did cover quite a good ground. You have been an awesome moderator. You did cover a lot. Thank you.
Michael Fillios
Okay, terrific. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. And to learn more about CDO magazine or to view more interviews, please visit cdomagazine tech. Thanks again.
Balaram Tidhi
Thank you.
This podcast was originally posted on CDO Magazine
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