(US and Canada) Kiran Kanetkar, Former Senior Director of Data Engineering, BI and Analytics, Petco, speaks with David Mariani, CEO, AtScale, about pursuing a data analytics career, the need for self-service analytics, and the literacy required for implementing it.

He has over 25 years of experience leading technology strategy for small to large companies. Sharing advice for younger people interested in careers in data and analytics, he says that with more data and new tools coming into this space, it is a promising place to be. However, Kanetkar maintains they should try different things to discover their preferences.

Regarding Petco’s data and analytics priorities for 2022 and beyond, Kanetkar says that as more and more data becomes available, business teams need to do their data and analytics using self-service tools. He adds that he focuses on enabling various business teams to generate insights and provide them with the right tools. He emphasizes, however, that self-service requires data literacy and data governance to be successful.

Unless data users are data literate and understand how the data is organized across the company, they won’t be able to use it to find insights and cannot use the information correctly.

Kanetkar maintains that without governance and the right processes, multiple teams will come up with different insights and, in turn, make different decisions.