Tom Pohlmann: Hello and welcome to the CDO Magazine interview series. I’m Tom Pohlmann, Chief Marketing Officer with AHEAD, and we are partnering with CDO magazine, MIT CDOIQ, and the International Society of Chief Data Officers in a series of informative interviews. Today, I have the great pleasure of talking with Iwao Fusillo, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at General Motors. Iwao, thanks for joining. How are you today?

Iwao Fusillo: I’m doing great and thanks so much for the opportunity. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Pohlmann: Excellent. Our pleasure. Tell us a little bit about your background and your role at GM.

Fusillo: I am the Chief Data and Analytics Officer for General Motors. As many of you probably know, data and analytics are very much at the heart of GM’s all-electric, zero-emissions future. I’m responsible for driving GM’s program for enterprise-wide analytics as well as our top-tier data science capabilities. We enable this by leading the end-to-end data life cycle and by establishing the business processes we need for best-in-class data strategy, architecture, governance, and democratization.

I also serve as General Motors’ data evangelist. And in this role, I really do two key things. First, I ensure that all of our analytics teams use a value-based approach to define their priorities. And second, I serve as a thought leader and a trusted business advisor to senior management to identify and scope the specific strategy and analytic opportunities that are truly transformative in their value creation potential. Prior to GM, I held the same position at the National Football League, the NFL. And prior to the NFL, I split my career evenly between two roles at American Express. I was the global head of data and analytics for about half of my career, and then I was the co-head of mergers and acquisitions at American Express for the other half.

Pohlmann: Very cool. So Amex, NFL, and GM — talk about some iconic brands you’ve been associated with! Great! Let’s start with some of the top priorities as a data and analytics leader. When we surveyed IT enterprise clients at the end of 2020, the number one priority for our technology leaders was to deliver better insights to businesses and to do it faster. Where does that priority rank at GM? If you had to boil down what you’re doing to address that priority, how would you describe it?

Fusillo: I do think marrying data and business strategy is super important for GM. Let me describe to you a little bit about how we are transforming.

Traditionally, GM’s core business processes, manufacturing, product design, vehicle, content optimization, have been highly integrated data and business strategy-oriented businesses, and often inextricably linked. You wouldn’t be able to do one without the other.

The reality is, though — and this is what I find really exciting — we have massive pools of new data coming. One example is data from the vehicle. And so, in fact, what we’ve done is, we’ve created a new role within my team. We call it the Chief Data Strategist role. And what does that do? It provides leadership to these new pools of data, with vehicle data just being one of the hundreds of examples. So, we can quickly data engineer it and productionize it. The reason that’s so important is, new data pools are typically highly unstructured. And putting the data engineering, the quality checks, production-ready industrial-strength processes in place enables us to immediately use these new pools of data to drive a better customer experience. That’s what we’re all about. Customers are at the center of everything. With these new data pools, we have a unique opportunity to reimagine the customer experience.

Again, I think the audience is quite familiar with this, but as we move to an all-electric future, we’re driving toward a vision of zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. And this is one of many examples of how we’re pulling in these new pools of data to transform that marriage between business strategy and the new pools of data.