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, the CEO of IT Ally and a CDO Editorial Board Member, engages in an enlightening conversation with Balaram Tidhi, Vice President, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Artera Services. Tidhi takes us through his captivating journey of becoming a data leader, recounting how early experiences shaped his career and ignited a passion for the transformative potential of data. He shares significant career milestones, from designing a data warehouse for GA Plastics in 2000 to building a global data analytics team from scratch at Red Hat. He also explores his role as a tech translator and change agent in various industries. The discussion provides a deep dive into the challenges Tidhi faced and how he overcame them, particularly around data quality, governance, and establishing trust within an organization. He also talks about aligning strategies with stakeholders to ensure business objectives are met. Read the full transcript of the Podcast below.
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
My pleasure. I know we have a lot to get to, so let’s dive right in. So Balaram, tell us a little bit more about your interest in data, AI and digital technologies and how this influenced your background and prepared you for your current role today as Chief Data and analytics officer.
Balaram Tidhi
Yeah, thank you. Growing up, I was always captivated by these puzzles and patterns. Little did I know this fascination would actually shape up into this career of a data leader. It’s a part of the evolution that happened. The main thing that happened was that the turning point in my journey came when I was given an opportunity to design a data warehouse for GA Plastics way back in 2000. And it was a very pivotal moment where I witnessed the firsthand, the incredible power of data and its profound impact on the businesses. Right. So when I got this, when I saw the results, I got the appreciation whatnot? That experience has really sparked a fire within me to explore the vast potential of data in transforming organization which has been there for a while. Right. Even AI we are speaking today has been there. People have always known data is there.
Balaram Tidhi
But through my career, as It progressed, I ventured into the world of consulting, working on both the front end and the back end. So I got used to technologies specifically right, in various industries. This exposure actually provided me with a valuable experience of navigating this unique data challenges of this by all these sectors can be healthcare, it can be construction. Everyone had their own lens into it. It was during this time that I realized the importance of data management and analytics techniques and leveraging digital technologies to gain this competitive edge. So one of the highlights of my journey was the opportunity to build a global data analytics team from scratch in a company called Red Hat. This experience taught me the delicate balance between the data driven decision making and cultivating a data centric culture within organizations. Right. I became like a translator, bridging the gap between IT and like, leading to various digital transformation projects along the way.
Balaram Tidhi
My storytelling capability actually got somebody in my audience referred me to a professor in UGA, so his name is Rick Watson. And we had interviews and say, hey, can you teach a Fintech course? And I said, yeah, I know. Maybe 70%, I can link it. But went through its majority is technology and also data and digital. So that led to me, a part time professor, like an adjunct professor role in Fintech and further my passion in transformational power of data. The second question, like how it prepared me for this data. Just looking at the background of my various exposures and being this tech translator, a change agent, and having my diverse experience really equipped me holistic perspective, allowing me to comprehend these unique challenges and opportunities that arise within different business contexts in this current company. Artera is an infrastructure services company. It’s a private equity firm.
Balaram Tidhi
We a lot of mergers and acquisitions. We get companies together. So data is so key for us to really change it. So that’s how my It prepared me to this story. It’s an evolutionary journey. As you know, the CDO role doesn’t have a fixed job description, various backgrounds. That’s why it’s so exciting, even being in this community to have exposure to so much variety of people and learning from them. So that’s a long answer, but hopefully it gave you a background.
Michael Fillios
Well, it’s a great segue because all of that experience, I’m sure, has brought forward some challenges for you. Right? And I think our audience would love to hear more about some of those challenges that you faced and more specifically, how did you overcome them either in this current role or previous roles that you’ve experienced.
Balaram Tidhi
Yes. So some of the challenges you’re asking yes, for sure. Oh yeah. So one of the key one is always the data quality and the governance, right? And being very mindful about the utilization of the data, by the end customers or the business, you can get lost in data. So the challenge was always the end. You deliver a data product, business uses it, they get success and then there is no control feedback loop, how long they’re going to use it. So making sure that consistency is there, that feedback loop is strong. So that we do the required surgical corrections. And being very mindful about what features are we focused to maintain. The quality, the governance around it, the regulations, everything involved, right? So keeping the footprint smaller, but very highly impactful. So the challenge has been that and is around how can we get more skin in the game for the business.
Balaram Tidhi
Like between the data consumers and data producers. We can talk about these data contracts and making them talk, make sure that there’s no data drift happening just because business is changing. Our models are little outdated. So how do we keep ahead of it? How do we have some policies and processes and some guidelines always creating those, guardrails around with some framework like Crisp DM and things like that. So that we maintain the quality and trust mostly of the business, so that they can give more challenging projects or bring us more onto the discussion table of the board, or bringing us closer to the business strategy that initially, as data leaders, we need to really break the ice and get into it like getting closer to the business. So unless they are comfortable with what we can offer, the chair will not be there for us to go and represent us.
Balaram Tidhi
So that has always been like sitting in the back in making sure people can share their dirty laundry of data so that they are comfortable to share and work with me. That has been the challenge of maintaining that quality and trust once delivered.
Michael Fillios
And I think again, this goes sort of to the next question which talks about aligning those strategies with your different stakeholders and making sure they’re meeting the business objectives. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that and the nature of the different entities that you support inside of Artera. But more generally, how do you ensure that what the data team is doing is highly focused on what the business objectives are?
Balaram Tidhi
Absolutely. We have like a quarterly readout with an executive team. We intentionally keep ourselves very open and accountable so that they know, okay, this three months, this is what we have in a backlog, this is what we are focused on. And business understands what the impact not only the business, even the team member knows the value they’re providing. So that there’s no distraction on the shiny object syndrome. Right. So we want to make sure that we are staying on course and with proper understanding about where the impact is happening. That brings a lot of positivity in the team and also the buy in. It’s all in all like win situations. But having these quarterly meetings that we have with executives showing what progress we have, even very incremental sometimes we may not have significant we have a lot of blockers. They will be mindful about us rather than point fingers.
Balaram Tidhi
They don’t know, right, what happens in the back end. We might be dealing with a very heavy lift of a quality issue. That outcome is not there. But having very close loop with the business helps us. So that’s how one of the ways is like keeping open communication channel, creating a safety net for the team, making sure they understand the priorities. Having less is more mindset. That’s how I’ll try to mitigate as much as they can.
Michael Fillios
Yeah, I like the less is more component. I’m sure you mentioned this earlier too that you don’t want to boil the ocean with these kinds of initiatives. You’ve got to show value quickly. So maybe you can give some examples of how you’ve been able to rapidly deliver value even though we’re talking about big topics like AI and innovation and pretty sophisticated stuff.
Balaram Tidhi
Yeah, absolutely. So when I joined, the way it happened is the CFO of Artera K1 said like, hey, we have this data, all these trucks, all the telematics data you have for eight operating companies you have data, but you’d like to have insights into it, like how can we get? So right now, maybe a consulting firm is providing us every monthly report of just our assets across the companies and how they’re all the way from not only the registry of assets, but how much gas these trucks, these are heavy trucks that actually work in the construction field. So the fuel burn and the repairs and maintenance and all this information. And can we share what is lease rental, that type of information. Data is there, but there’s no quick insights for the business to take some decisions. So, to give an example, right, it depends on the culture of the business and how much of data mindset the organization DNA has.
Balaram Tidhi
So, coming to a fresh plate, I cannot go and ask X number of dollars to get the ball rolling. So it’s leveraging the existing technologies. What can we do? So this is Microsoft Shop preliminary most of the stuff. So I used that and then leveraged the cloud technology to ingest this data like a bubblegum duct tape, just because of the crawl stage. I want to show the proof of value. We had all these, wherever these reports are there individual systems. Emails were sent onto this one inbox and from there we used some Python to process that, put it in the cloud and give a report. So that was the first step in the door. Yes, I could get a clear bird eye view across the board. And that’s when the journey started, the trust started building in. And you use all kinds of techniques as you grow, right?
Balaram Tidhi
So one is definitely the change, another is the communication and making sure you are out there as part of a CDO role. Artera is the company’s. My company’s name is Artera, so I put an “SM” in the front and made it SMArtera so everyone’s like, oh, fine, you’re smart guys. I felt like people give you a lot of slack. But it’s a great culture. The company has a great culture and when you have some creativity or innovation, they really support it. So Artera has been awesome when the SMArtera had a challenge. We need to live up to the standards of being smart. So we started delivering value and they got the context. And we did all kinds of techniques of change management and also for data governance, we spinned out a project called Project Moneyball. If you’ve seen the Moneyball movie, so that people know why moneyball is like, yeah, there’s so much of value, you get some kind of icebreaker and getting into them and explaining complex concepts.
Balaram Tidhi
Like even for the forecasting, predicting the data mining, the feature engineering, what’s the data preparation think simple things like this Crisp DM framework I was talking about that shares what upfront time you’re spending rather than jumping immediately into solutioning. If you look at the Crisp DM format, it goes with business understanding, data understanding, then data preparation. That’s where they create identify the various features, right? Called feature in your data preparation. And then comes the modeling. Then you have the deployment, and then you have monitoring, right? So there is this process that we don’t want to jump just because of leadership pressure to just go and do it. Go through this process, ask the wise and make sure you have a proper solid use case before you go behind the project. So that kind of motor really helped us to bring out explain this complex AI, the new generator of AI.
Balaram Tidhi
Explain to the people what AI really is. Do you really have a business use case for AI shouldn’t do for the sake of doing AI? Kind of, right? So those all things came in okay.
Michael Fillios
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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