Yum! Brands, Chief Data Officer: Complex Business Structure Creates Data Opportunities

Mitchell Roberts: Hello and welcome to the CDO Magazine Interview Series. I'm Mitchell Roberts with TripleBlind, the software-solution company enhancing private data sharing, and we're partnering with CDO Magazine, MIT CDOIQ, and the International Society of Chief Data Officers in a series of interviews. Today I have the pleasure of talking with Cameron Davies, Chief Data Officer at Yum! Brands, which operates the Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut franchises, among others.

Let's just kick it off. I've got a few questions here to ask you. So I'll just go ahead and get started. So Yum! Brands as we know, has an enormous global footprint with a presence in over 150 countries.

Could you describe the company's global footprint and what the implications are on managing data and analytics?

Cameron Davies: It's enormous. We've actually got four brands that operate in 150 different countries and over 50,000 stores. We largely operate in a decentralized manner, letting our brands run their businesses, which we think is the best way to manage the business at a local level. We've got over 2,000 franchisees that own 98% of our stores, which means they're the ones running the 1.5 million employees around the world. It's a complex business structure, but it also creates a lot of opportunities.

As you can imagine, we think about data, the size of our data, the flows of our data, and what you can do with it. So the implications are fairly material there — how you run that business, how you gather that data, how it flows and how you scale it.

Roberts: Yeah, definitely. It's really interesting to think about data strategy on a global level because you're dealing with a treasure trove of data from all these different places and all these different brands and bringing it together and making sense of it. And it's a huge opportunity and, of course, a challenge.

It's a good spot to be in managing that. My next question for you is how would you define the role of a global data and analytics leader and what makes the role of a global D&A unique or more challenging than someone more regionally focused?

Davies: Neither of them is easy. Let's be honest, whether you're at a regional level or a business level, or a global level. I think at a regional level, the thing that is distinct is that you tend to be able to be a lot more focused on the priorities in that region. It's a little bit easier to see those.

For example, here's what we're trying to do in this region or this country, generally where most of your data is, and how it flows. So you understand what it means, because you're close to it every day and have the ability to really prioritize, run that business. You always keep an eye to scale and shareability across the enterprise, but your priorities are really about your priorities because that's what you're paid and directed to go do.

Once you move up to a global level, it changes the nature of it. I don't control anything at that level. So it is now about influence; it's all about relationships and how you get the work done. We have a set of filters very tied in on how we perform and whether or not it's scalable, whether or not it's strategic and how it fits to other parts of the business.

And so, that means we have to kind of be laser-focused with those priorities. That means I spend a ton of time with both the brand and regional level CTOs, CMOs, and CFOs, to really understand what their priorities are, and what they are trying to accomplish within their business. What are their business problems? What are those common connective tissues?

We made sure that we're working on the things that benefit the most people, the fastest, as we decide what we're going to work on as a global team. It just changes the nature of what you do. Neither of them is easy, but it just changes how you have to go about getting it done in a lot of cases.

Roberts: That's a really interesting way to think about it. As you know, you think of a typical, maybe a regionally focused Chief Data Officer, somebody making all the decisions — what are we doing with their data? What are we doing with our analytics? How are we doing it? But it sounds like in your position, on the global scale, it becomes more of an influencer role, to become an expert delegator, making sure people are making the right decisions because there's no way to practically make all those decisions by yourself. It's a really interesting way to think about it. 

Davies: And you've got to balance it out. At some point, you can't force anybody to do something negative to their business. But how do you balance out the greater good toward the local? It’s always top of mind.

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