Women’s Month Special | WLDA.tech Founding Member: Self-Promotion Is Incredibly Hard for Women

(US and Canada) Julia Bardmesser, Founding Member of WLDA.tech, speaks with Asha Saxena, Founder and CEO of WLDA.tech, in a special International Women’s Month video interview about women in leadership positions, how corporations can work with women leaders, and the important components of a data strategy. The interview is part of CDO Magazine's series celebrating women in data science, machine learning, and analytics.

With a grandmother and mother who were scientists, Bardmesser never questioned whether women could be scientists. The environment was different when she began her career in the U.S., where there were only a handful of women developers in a large technology company. As Bardmesser’s career progressed and she reached leadership positions, she often found she was the only woman in meetings.

Bardmesser stresses the need for corporations to create a pipeline of female leaders, help them progress, and deal with the various aspects of personal and professional development. She highlights that self-promotion is incredibly hard for women and they need to learn how to negotiate for a better salary or position.

She also highlights the need to build a data strategy, the important elements, and the challenges. Bardmesser mentions that a key challenge is to connect business imperatives to underlying data capabilities. Traditional companies need technology and business analysis resources to move their product forward, so they need to find a way to prioritize data capabilities against day-to-day support of the business, she explains.

Bardmesser urges business leaders to prioritize data quality upfront and for the long term, and to understand that it also needs to happen in the business processes or the front-end technology systems. Companies realizing that sooner and creating business data strategies to infuse their decision making and prioritizations will get much further ahead and can leverage data better.

According to Bardmesser, organizations also need an executive understanding of how their growth relies on master data. She urges data leaders to start with strategic data literacy for the business side so they understand the connection between business growth and underlying data capabilities.

In conclusion, Bardmesser notes that digital transformation depends on understanding how business goals rely not only on data but also on data capabilities to make data useful.

CDO Magazine appreciates Julia Bardmesser for sharing her insights and data success stories with our global community.