DN Meets... Caroline Carruthers.

Data Ninjas sat down recently with the wonderful Caroline Carruthers to discuss what it is like being a pioneering female in the Data industry, the inspirations for the 'Chief Data Officer's Playbook', and she even let us into a little exclusive...

Caroline, we meet today actually at this years ‘Big Data World Conference’, how has it been this year?

You can see that it has got a lot of vendors this year, some of the speakers have been really interesting this time around. And I can’t wait to get to the sessions this afternoon. I like hearing my peers talk, I like hearing what they are up to. I’m nosey like that!

I’m really looking forward to hearing Pete, I have to mention Peter Jackson. He presenting a fascinating talk this afternoon based around Game of Thrones. Which I cannot wait for!

Can we catch you speaking at any events this year?

Certainly, as you know I’m actually speaking at Big Data World tomorrow, but other than that, I’m speaking in Johannesburg in June, also Poland, and Germany. I’m doing the Information Age one in May, and Big Data London in November. Peter and I have also been invited to speak to the EU in June about data as well so that should be fun!

In terms of your career thus far, you previously held the CDO at Network Rail, a position you held for a while, and perhaps were actually doing the role for even longer than that, how has the role of the Chief Data Officer changed over that period of time?

I think it’s changing all the time. What is happening to it is that as more and more people are becoming Chief Data Officers, and therefore bringing different ideas to the table; there is a real diversity of thought between Chief Data Officers. We come from lots of different backgrounds. Interestingly more creative people are starting to come into the role, which I find absolutely fascinating, but we tend to come from backgrounds such as Tech, or Governance, or Analytics, and as we do the role is starting to grow up.

Initially, if you went back a few years ago, if you tried to clearly define what a Chief Data Officer did, probably it would say they are a bit too technically led, or they didn’t know what they wanted. Now we are a lot clearer about what a Chief Data Officer is, but it still isn’t quite nailed down yet, so I’d say we’ve gone from a scale of 100 down to a scale of 10, but we still need to do some honing.

What would you say the areas of honing we have left to do?

I think that organisations need to understand what they are getting, and what they want the Chief Data Officer to do. Are they looking at a real risk adverse point of view? So do they want someone with a really strong governance background to do that role? Are they looking at really massive value add? So are they looking at potentially looking for someone from a creative analytical background? And so it really depends on the experience you can bring to the role. There is no Unicorn Chief Data Officer that I have met that can do the whole role. It is about building a team around you that balances each other out.

As you mention, the role seems to be forever evolving. What is it like to be at the heart of an industry that is growing and changing all the time?

It is absolutely amazing. I genuinely love it. The energy, the passion around this area at the moment is just incredible. The only time in my career I can remember feeling this real sense of community, with this energy and drive; was when I was lucky enough in the 80’s when we were starting to build rapid application development methods, which we now know as Agile. And at the time, because we were figuring out a problem, the problem was outside of companies, it wasn’t siloed, so you had all different companies chipping in. A lot of different people, countries, and those barriers didn’t exist because we’re united trying to solve this problem. And I get the same feeling from the world of data currently, I’m not worried about what country I’m speaking in, I’m not thinking about secrets I might give away. We all have this problem we are trying to solve together.

Do you think the industry is doing enough to encourage more people in the field?

I think there is a lot more we can do, as there is a lot of people involved with data that perhaps don’t realise that they are. And I’m really keen to improve everybody’s understanding of data, some of the things that happened in the press recently show we have to be careful of how we use Social Media. Now don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan of Social Media, I think there are a lot of plus sides, but people need to recognise the downsides too.

As an industry it’s about growing, and learning, and encouraging, doing talks at events like this. I’m a representative of an organisation called CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, they focussed in the past primarily on the Librarian sector, and are trying to broaden their appeal now to encourage more Data and Analytics professionals as well. As a Chartered Institute they are on a par with the British Computer Society, and they aren’t necessarily as well known, so they are doing a lot of work looking at how they brand themselves to data and information professionals.

I would encourage anyone reading this to have a look at their website (https://www.cilip.org.uk/), because that to me feels like the right type of organisation to start driving the inclusiveness in our industry. They have some brilliant competency bits on their website, different ways of motivating our industry, so go check it out!

I don’t want to spend too much time on the negative, but how frustrating is it to be part of an industry that is doing so much positive work, yet it is the small portion of negative news that makes the headlines?

I think that if you look at the way the press that we deal with every day, the negative stuff sells newspapers, and makes people turn on their TV.

But what we can do?

In every way we can promote the good stuff. Like we are doing now.

On the flip side then, if you could counter that, what would you suggest as being the biggest breakthrough in Analytics in recent times?

That is such a hard question to answer! I would really struggle because some of the things that are happening are evolutionary. I mean look at the potential for what Blockchain could do outside the Financial sector, look at the potential of IoT, the things that I like are the things that have real world application upon people’s lives. Like a piece of Technology I’m aware of that allows older people to stay in their house for longer, that sort of stuff is fascinating and makes a difference to people’s lives.

Would I be right in assuming that when you got into Analytics, it wasn’t getting the attention, good or bad, that it gets now, so what drove you to get into Data?

I honestly kind of fell into it a little bit, my background is in the IT and Governance side of things, so I came at it from a Programme Director/CIO type role, but all through my career I recognised the importance of data and innovation, and actually when you are trying to solve real world business problems data is normally at the heart of that problem. The more I started to focus on that, you could see my attention shift to, actually how do we solve the real problem? Then how do we use the other tools? Which is things like the IT and Governance around it, to make sure the problem doesn’t exist anymore.

At that time, were you being actively encouraged to seek answers within Data or was that your inquisition that led you down that route?

That was my inquisition. I am an insanely curious person. Some call it nosey, I call it curious! And I like to know why things happen, and the reasons behind it, the root cause. And honestly, what I found more and more is that data is at the heart of it all!

Was there much in the way of friction from Senior Management about that idea at the time? Because we still hear stories now of friction towards Data driven decision making!

You do find people’s eyes glazed over a bit, and part of that was me, I’ve since learned how to tell a much more effective story with data. So as my career’s gone on, I’ve become a much bigger advocate, and so I don’t talk to my stakeholders about data. I talk to them about what keeps them awake at night, what are their issues, and use their language to talk to them, then use data to solve the problems.

Not everyone needs to speak data language, or my language, but I do need to be able to translate between these different types of languages, because in data we do speak a different language at times.

Not so long ago, we celebrated International Woman’s Day. What does it feel like as a female to be at the forefront of your industry?

For me, I genuinely feel tremendously lucky. I’ve been to a lot of conferences; when I was newly minted Chief Data Officer, where I was the only woman in the room. And the gentleman in those rooms never made me feel any less than 100% welcome. So the people I work with, the friends I’ve made, made me feel welcome and a big part of the community.

Have you seen a shift in the male/female balance at those events of late?

Definitely. There are more and more woman. And we certainly have a balance starting to creep in. We’re not there yet, but if you look at the Gartner statistics on this, the CDO role is becoming one of the most diverse of the C suite roles.

I think this is because it’s new. It’s evolving, it’s changing, it’s exciting. It also welcomes lots of different types of people. So if you look at some of the more traditional C Suite roles you assume you have to have a level of technical competence, and so at the time that would have happened our girls weren’t encouraged to go through the STEM subjects. We don’t have those blockers with the Chief Data Officer position.

I can imagine many females in Data see you as an inspiration, what other females did/do you look to for inspiration?

I would probably mention 2.

I would mention Katia from Vodafone, who I think is doing a phenomenal job, and plus she is a lovely person. And the second one, is not actually within data, but she is a hero of mine; Maggie Philbin. When I was a kid watching TV there weren’t a lot of female presenters, and there was one show on TV that focussed on technology called ‘Tomorrows World’. So for the time period it was on, at the time nothing else existed. I was glued to the TV. I was such a geek, I couldn’t wait to watch it. She was literally the only female I saw playing with this technology as a kid, and that really inspired me. And actually I know she is still doing some work to encourage females into STEM subjects, through an organisation called TeenTech. She showed me women can do this. It is one of the reasons I put so much effort into coming to events like this one. There is this interesting dynamic with women, and I am putting us all in the same boat here; in that we don’t want to be seen to be cocky or arrogant, but doing events like this is incredibly important to show other women they can do this. If anyone ever hires me because I am woman, I will be so angry. I want to be hired because I am a great Chief Data Officer, not because I am a female.

We couldn’t meet with you and not bring up your book! Was it always an ambition of yours to write a book?

It was definitely a childhood dream to write. When I was a kid I did not expect my first book to be about being a Chief Data Officer, but I have always had that creative side to me. So this was so appealing to me; to use all angles of my persona that maybe don’t always get to come out in my everyday job! You can push analogies, and push ideas that you want people to talk about. Peter and I never expected everyone to agree with everything in the book. We wanted to start conversation, and debate.

Where did the idea of the book come from?

I’m sure people would imagine it was a really well thought out plan! And I would love people to believe I had this grand plan! What actually happened is that Peter and I were speaking at an event together, literally about a year to the day before the book got published. It was the first time we had met, we spoke and we just clicked. The next day Peter came in, and said: “We should write a book” because we had both said how there is no rule book, there is no guide for a Chief Data Officer. We’re all trying to figure this out and help each other so let’s write it down. And truthfully I thought the idea would die out.

But we both went away, and just really got the bug for this. We do actually really want to write this book. I went back to him and said “I’ve been thinking about it, it should include this, this, this and this”, and he just completely agreed, and vice versa. It just clicked. It literally was about two weeks later we had a rough outline of the book, and it evolved from there.

We decided to do a few articles on LinkedIn to check our voice would resonate with people, and we had only put one or two articles out when two publishers contacted us and said “Have you thought about writing this as a book?”. It was only a year from us meeting, to us publishing the book.

Have you been fed back some great success stories that people have had from this book?

I’ve had some amazing success, people have used it for interview prep, I had a wonderful message from someone who has worked in data for a decade, and it had made things crystal clear for them, and helped them make the next step. So those things are wonderful to hear. Humbling, but amazing at the same time.

I spoke at the British Computer Society in March, and one of the people in the audience was sitting there with a copy of the book. She said “I’m 40 days into my job, and this is my bible”.

We wanted to make the book really accessible for everyone. Because data affects everyone. Obviously it is aimed at Chief Data Officers, or people hiring a Chief Data Officer, but it is a book anyone can pick up and understand.

How has the book impacted your profile and your brand in industry?

The book has been incredible. Peter and I didn’t think in our wildest dreams that we would get the kind of response to the book that we had. We both have day jobs, we are both full time Chief Data Officers, but it is about finding a balance between helping people in the industry, and being the best CDO’s we can be.

What particular message in the book you are most proud of?

For me, the one that resonates the most to me, the most personal to me; is the Hoarding Principle. The Hoarding Principle was a lightbulb moment for me. My son and I were watching really bad telly as we often do, and were watching a show about hoarders. And I was feeling really bad for this person who couldn’t live in their own home because it had so much junk. It just hit me that that is us in our organisations. We have crammed our organisations so full of data just in case, we aren’t using it to the fullest anymore. It’s doing more with less. Focussing on quality and diversity rather than volume. As human beings, we have this thought that bigger is better.

I still hear people referring to the cost of data, as how much storage or a Petabyte costs, but that is not the cost of data. The cost of data is every time you have to replicate a process because you can’t find what you are looking for. Or the data wasn’t available when you needed it. The wasted effort. If we made the data efficient, and trustworthy and accessible, how much time that would save an organisation. It’s having it to hand, and understanding the quality of what you’ve got. You have to trust your own data.

Can we finish with an exclusive, will there be a sequel, or a follow up to the book?

We are discussing doing a second, yes. We are currently discussing the format with our publishers now. Sometimes I have to pinch myself at all of this, it’s like I’m now living in a different world!