BMO Financial Group, Enterprise Chief Data and Analytics Officer: In the Organizational Transformation Journey, Value Pragmatism and Practicality

(US and Canada) Sandip Sahota, Enterprise Chief Data and Analytics Officer, BMO Financial Group, talks with Susan Wilson, VP Global Data Governance and Privacy Segment Leader, Informatica, about the advice that he would like to share with professionals who aspire to be a CDO or CDAO or have just risen to CDO. First, he suggests honing the organization's culture, views, and core principles.

Sahota promotes honing your organization's culture and honing your view of your core principles. He promotes being practical and pragmatic. He advises that a fair amount of conversation in organizations can be ideological in many of these transformation journeys, and he values pragmatism and practicality in the journey. Finally, he advises from his own experience and journey, that the newbies and aspirants stick to these principles to drive outcomes. Looking back on his journey, debate over how to achieve an outcome could lose focus from the actual mission and outcome. He notes every culture and every individual is unique, but this advice may have useful overlap for others.

Regarding valued delivery, Sahota shares that, BMO Financial Group has a relentless focus on customer and employee, and on measuring impact, and how to sustain that focus over time. As in many other organizations, BMO is at an exciting time pondering things like impact, where to invest, and how to invest. The results of these activities has helped the organization earn a fair amount of work in the [robotic process automation] RPA space and in the introduction of a BMO cash track that leverages AI to help understand customers' predictive cash flows.

Sahota explains that there are several ways of doing that and many economic variables that people can use to drive questions like, "Is this the right strategy?" and "Is this where we want to go?"

He shares further how they have anchored on all these and built a significant relationship with businesses where they can come back and say, "What would you have done if we were not here helping you with this outcome? What was the speed of decision making, the speed of execution, and what is the value of that? We can take these back to the organization all these pointers and questions and convey that experience has some stickiness, which has some value and delivers some outcome. Then, we can price the relationship of what we are doing relative to that. Moreover, is there a way to factor that into the overall equation?"

Sahota explains the value chain of data and how there are multiple parts to it: where is data created, how is it leveraged, where are we deriving value from it? Value delivery is dependent upon all these relationships, and connecting them. Sahota highlights that the organizations consider investments made and their associated returns.