Kiran Kodali, Global Data Strategy & Governance Lead, Sanof,i speaks with Leonard Maganza, Chief Customer Officer at Syniti about the ideal environment for leveraging automation and the approach to showcasing the value of investment to stakeholders. 

Kodali recalls his days at a banking organization where he worked on initiatives to move from manual processes toward optimizing business processes using automation. He followed a process called “mark to market” where the market pricing had to be updated along with trades for the day. This was being done manually at offshore locations despite the high volume of data. That was the first instance when Kodali realized how data jobs could be automated. Since then, there have been many scenarios  where Kodali and his teams have pursued ways to optimize and automate processes, especially between two systems — that is, business units entering data in system A, and the same data being moved to system B. 

While there is a certain degree of automation,there is still a lot of manual work due to the lack of standards. “The automation piece can only be empowered when there are quality checks and standards in place that enable the interoperability of data. And it’s critical that we set those ground rules when we are trying to move data or automated data processes,” Kodali explains.

He then discusses ways to get stakeholders and investors on the same page as the data teams so that they are involved and aware of the developments. Kodali says that while change management is an important element for any organization, it doesn’t work if the message isn’t conveyed fairly, or the stakeholders aren’t bought in.

“You will be left at either a POC or the MVP stage. We have this concept of co-creation to keep them involved throughout the journey,” Kodali continues. With everything we try to create, we always say we are co-creating with the functions. That shows that this is not someone else’s product but this is our solution. That gives some responsibility and accountability for the end-users to actually contribute more effectively, leading to better funding and outcome of the product,” he elaborates.

Apart from involving business stakeholders, data leaders also need a communication plan and a project management plan.

Kodali concludes by highlighting the necessity of POVs with POCs. “Before we talk about two-year or three-year transformation projects, it’s really important that we spend the first two or three months showing them what the product would look like; taking a small business use case and showing them that it might not be directly related to that function, but if it is reflecting one of the functions, they can see and relate to the solution.”