#78 How Data & Culture Unlock Digital Transformation (with Mai AlOwaish)

You're listening to Data Framed, a podcast by Data Camp. In this show, you'll hear all the latest trends and insights in data science. Whether you're just getting started in your data career or you're a data leader looking to scale data driven decisions in your organization, join us for in depth discussions with data and analytics leaders at the forefront of the data revolution. Leaders so let's dive right in.

Hello everyone, this is Adele, Data Science educator and Evangelist at datacamp. Something we've always spoken about on Data Framed is how organizations are adapting their culture, skills, technology, processes and more to a rapidly changing and increasingly digitized world. One thing I always hope to achieve with this podcast is to help others understand how they can change their own organizations and make them more data driven through others experiences. And there's no better experience to share than Maya Awaish's Mayla Awaish is the Chief Data Officer at Gulf Bank. She is a seasoned information systems and data analytics expert with 18 years of experience between Kuwait and the United States where she spearheaded a variety of data analytics and e commerce initiatives and enabled digital transformation for financial institutions, retailers, airlines and more. In her current position, Mai leads the data analytics practice in Gulf bank in and oversees the data strategy and implementation of data science analytics use cases. Mai has orchestrated the Data Ambassadors program to start a data driven culture and enable business users to self serve with analytics across the organization. Throughout the episode we speak about Mai's background, the CDO role and how it's evolving the cultural and people dimensions of data and digital transformation, the Data Ambassador program at Gulf bank, how to increase diversity inclusion in data science and and more. Now let's dive right in. Mai, it's great to have you on the show and I'm excited about our discussion today. You have a very wide range of experiences across industries such as retail consulting, e commerce, banking across a wide range of locations. You're currently the Chief Data Officer of Gulf bank, one of the largest retail banks in Kuwait. I'd love to hear your journey, how it has culminated in your current role and how you view the role of the Chief Data Officer evolving as ever since you joined the industry.

Thank you Adil. It's a pleasure to be here. Honestly, my journey has been in E commerce and ending up in data and I always tell my team members that I just kind of followed the trend where it went. The beginning of my journey started with banking of course, and I was focused on like online banking and kind of the digital transformations in the early 2000s. So back then having an Online banking or phone banking was the concept of digital transformation. And in a way we didn't realize the data aspect of it. It was more about technology and now digital transformation is about data. And that's kind of slowly how I went from doing digital banking and then I focused on working with Google partners in the past 10 years with data and analytics solution. And I always say the past 10 years were pure data analytics. The prior 10 years to that were purely banking. And now my role is kind of, you know, involves everything that I did in the past 20 years where I'm mixing all of the digital banking with the data analytics to establish the data analytics office here.

That's really great. And in terms of the CDO role, you know, there's been consistent evolution on that front. How do you view the CDO amended today? And especially when it comes to large scale data transformation projects?

I think it's, you know, some people think of the data officer role as somebody who just does the data analytics. And in my way, I think it's more about knowing that we have data as an asset and that every single department realize that the data that they touch is contributing to the overall organization's objectives. So one of the key things I see that data officers really have to do is really teach up the organization. So to learn about data, know that every single person in the organization touches data. There is no organization right now without somebody sitting at a computer either crunching a report or reading a report. And that's what I see. That the chief data officer role is to make sure that they are aware of their kind of role as a person who's dealing with data and they are a stakeholder in the data.

Now you mentioned your experience in digital transformation in the early 2000s. Of course, digital transformation is still major today has been a priority for financial services and banking institutions for the past decade. This has been only accelerated by the COVID 19 pandemic. Given last year's acceleration, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the state of digital transformation in banking today and the type of value banks are able to unlock with it.

I think what the pandemic did is kind of just like you said, accelerated the digital transformation. It was a high need. Digital transformation started a while ago. Before that, maybe they were given a priority, but not as much as the urgency that the pandemic added. One thing that we saw out of this digital transformation is we received a huge influx of data. And I've seen it not only in banks, even in the past two years when I work With E commerce, once the pandemic hits, all of these customers coming into retail store like the brick and mortar stores, they were coming online, leaving digital footprints everywhere on our website, giving us easy behaviors to see. And starting for us, we started like drawing Personas about the customers that we know. And it just added a lot of value to the data sets that we already had, but we did not know who is doing what, especially for those walking in the stores and doing. And the same thing applies to the bank. Many people love going to the branch and doing that experience. I think once they started doing those stuff digital, they stuck to the digital channel. And now for us, it's easier to roll up that data. It's easy for us to draw the customer experience, draw the customer journey because we have it in a digital format already in a way, it's become much easier for us on the data and digital side to analyze in a much faster way. Instead of waiting for the customer to come in and ask them to fill a survey or ask them for their experience. It's already coming in the format that we were wishing that it comes with and few years ago. And I think there's a lot of value to unlock in that. And as anything when we collect data, it's usually the first few months where we're trying to collect more data, but then we wait for more data to find trends and draw some models and all of that stuff. We already have a year in right now or more and we're going to build on that ongoing because as I said, people are staying with the digital even though things are opening up, some people are comfortable now doing their transaction digitally more than coming into the branch or coming to the store. And I think that's where we're seeing that some businesses thought that they lose that digital footprint, but it didn't go away. It's still there, it's still strong. And although people still come to the branch, but they still do stuff online and that means we're able to build more and more with data going forward.

So as Gulf Bank's Chief Data Officer, you're at the forefront of digital transformation initiatives. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how intertwined digital transformation and data transformation are and where do you think they intersect or not?

I mean, so as I mentioned a while ago that, you know, previously digital transformation was pure technology effort, that you're taking a transaction or some kind of process that is happening manually and you're trying to digitize it. Now, you know, in the current age, digital transformation is about Being client centric, it's about being somebody who knows exactly what they want. And we know that when can we push this product to the client because we know that he is at this phase of the purchase or the customer journey. So with the current approach of digital transformation, being client centric requires a lot of data about this client. And that's where we say we really need a lot of data to become client centric or to perform that digital transformation. It kind of become part, a necessary part of digital transformation to first build the data platforms and then go into the digital transformation. Otherwise, if I'm building a customer journey and planning the journey without knowing exactly what the customer needs, there's no way for me to push the right product or to assess that this customer is actually planning to maybe close this account because of a certain behavior that we saw. And we won't be able to take the right action unless we have the right data. So to me, it became kind of an integral part of the transformation right now. And it's not just the technology.

I'd love to deep dive specifically into how data or digital transformation projects are not just technology initiatives. Now, given the importance of data transformation within digital transformation projects, I wonder what you view as the key lever of acceleration in these types of programs. Do you think in that regard it's more technology or people driven? And how so?

So when we talk about digital transformation within the company, I think, and I always say it's people, people, people, then technology. Because if you get the right technologies in place and you get top of the line data platforms and all of that stuff, if people are used to extracting that Excel sheet and then crunching it into something, they'll still do it. Digital transformation, if you have the right data, if you have the right platforms, but the wrong people or just the wrong mindset on people, it will not succeed and you'll still be stuck into the pre digital transformation era. And I think part of it is not just educating people on these tools, but actually building the culture for it, building the actual bridging that digital transformation, how it adds up to their value and how it kind of roll up into the whole organization, objectives and strategy and all of that stuff. One thing that I've seen, you know, kind of make or break transformation is the people who are not just leading it, it's the people who are involved and affected by this transformation. Because the people affected by this transformation, they can just not make it happen. Because if they're not sold into that transformation, if they don't transform when you transform your solutions and systems and all that stuff, it's not going to help them go anywhere and it's going to make your transformation really not mean much. So the key factor is really start with the people, then go to the technology. And that's kind of something that I'm a firm believer and I've seen it happen more than once that when we start with the people, things go well. If we start with technology and then remember what the people need to do, transformation will fail.

Do you think then it's a misnomer for the industry to settle on the term digital transformation without necessarily doubling down on the data or people aspect of it?

I think so, because you say digital transformation and it has to do a lot with data, has a lot with people, you know, digitizing the process doesn't mean you're actually going to get it right if you don't have the right data. Digitizing the process where people are not, you know, informed of how this process affect their day to day process doesn't mean that this digital transformation is going to go through. One of the things that I think we struggle with is naming. There's like, and I see it all the time like I'm called the Chief Data Officer, technically the Chief Data and Analytics Officer. There is this chief Digital Officer and you know, there's Chief Information Officer, which they're technically it, but they talk about the CIO or information, but it's more of a Chief Technology Officer. So sometimes I don't like to use all of those names because they might really confuse us on the right agenda. I love how you said that, you know, it could be a misnomer. I totally feel that. And I think for probably lack of better names or just because digital makes sense to everybody.

Yeah, I definitely feel like it's very hard to sell the term people transformation.

Yes, yes. Then they'll go, okay, that's not us. That's, you know, that's something with hr. And it's very different when we talk about the people aspect of things. And even like if I say, you know, when I started here and a lot of people thinking, oh, so you're doing data, then you know, you're not really going to be talking to anybody in the bank where you're just focusing on the systems where the data lives and you're going to extract some reports or systems for us. And I said no, actually I work with everybody in the bank from the branch all the way to management, because everybody, if you're looking at data in your computer, then you are my stakeholder.

So if you want to break down the people component, what are the initiatives you think banks or other organizations need to scale in order to transform their culture into a data driven one.

So one of the things is that we need to, as a bank or as any organization there first needs to be kind of. I hate the word literacy, but it is a data literacy that you want to start with to make sure that everybody has a role that they play with data. And data literacy should be organization wide. Honestly. There's no organization right now, big or small, where data is not used by their team members over and over again throughout the day, and not just being used once, but sometimes reused to analyze some more and more every day. So they need to understand kind of what resources they're dealing with, the assets of data that they're dealing with, aside from just basic data literacy. I think one of the things is trying to identify different people that are key stakeholders in data and ensuring that they belong to a bigger team, which is what we call kind of the extended data team or the team that is directly connected to the data office or digital office or whatever we call it. But those people are exactly knowing kind of the journey of data and how things are changing. Otherwise, the whole journey of transformation, if you don't have the right people and the right calibers in place, it may have a hard time kind of getting traction.

That's perfect. And this marks a great segue into how you're accelerating data transformation and building a data culture at Gulf Bank Bank. So it's been exciting this year with the release of the Data Ambassador program. I've seen you evangelize this program across social channels and it's been great seeing it unfold from the sideline. Do you mind expanding into what the program entails and what are its goals?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's been over LinkedIn and I think the team made it so much fun with all the props and all of that stuff. It went viral and I think one of the key things that made this program go viral, it was people focused. Very much people focused. The way that we had this data ambassador program kind of orchestrated is that like I just said, we realized that every single department in the bank works with data. Whether it's, even if it's not client data, even if it's just data that use for day to day operations, even if it's like I say, facilities department, which, you know, they manage buildings and so on, but they do some reports internally. So anybody who's extracting, working with data is identified as an ambassador in the bank. And we had 140ambassadors out of almost 15, 1800 kind of staff along operational staff. So around 10% of the bank went through this program. And the way we phrase this program is that we are a data office, we have a data team, but then there's the extended data team which are kind of the army of people who working with data and embedded in every single department. These people need to know what we're doing with data and need to have a say in how the future of data and analytics and whether we're building data dictionary or we're moving into a new analytics platform. I cannot decide on the bank and I build practices for the overall good kind of the common good of the bank. But my stakeholders need to be involved as part of this transformation. And the way we did this is that yes, we identified all the people who are working with data across the bank. But that doesn't mean I just identified them and give them work first I have to teach them and I have to kind of do kind of a training program. Because before we start working with data we need to know kind of the data roles and responsibilities. And the way we started kind of we've done a five month program for these data ambassadors once they were recognized and what we call it the nomination process. So we did a big nomination process where every department nominated its ambassadors. And the way they were nominated is that these are the people who are doing my day to day reports or these are the people who are really creating data for me in the department. So we group those people and then we wanted to make sure that because of the large number we're a big organization. So 140 people, I cannot get them in one training room. It's not going to be effective. So we call them kind of, we group them in batches which is a maximum of 20 per group and then with these grouping we make sure that people from different departments are in each group. I don't want a single department per group, otherwise there won't be communication across the organization. Because communication is key when it comes to data. Because a data that is created at the branch is used in finance and then finance creates a report and risk use it for their risk analysis and the risk does something which the management uses for taking decision. So all of these different stakeholders need to have proper communication channels together. And that's how this data ambassadors program brought all of these people into the same platform. They go through a five month training program where first they learn about their roles and responsibilities and then they learn about data quality and then they will learn more about kind of how to improve the quality of data. How do they manage data going forward? What are the certain things that we need to worry about, kind of the data cleansing or how do we actually create really good data that is valuable and that creates insights. So all of the training program and then there is some tooling in the end. First we started the concepts, we started with the people and we launched this program this last month in October. So we'll be wrapping up in February, March. And once they are done with that training, then they are identified as the ambassador for their department. They are able to help their department with anything data. And then they work with us as the data office to be their kind of lifeline into anything that they need to do something for their department. If they're the data expert in the team and they need kind of more help in something or they have ideas, then they have the platform of the Data Ambassadors, which is more kind of a club for everybody data. And the idea is, even once we're done with this training program, I told their departments we're not done with them after this training, we're really going to have kind of those monthly meetups for all the analysts or the data Ambassadors because there's a lot of value in getting those people together in the same room communicating and talking.

That's wonderful. And I love how much emphasis there is around the community and how bottom up this transformation program is and not vice versa. You mentioned here, it's a five month program that goes from concepts to tools and so on and so forth. Can you walk me through the process of creating a data curriculum for your organization and, and how did you prioritize the skills that you chose to prioritize so currently.

And I love how you call it curriculum, given that your data camp and all about learning and curriculums. And it's funny, we actually use the same word. We didn't use training program or something. I said there is the ambassador curriculum and there is the kind of data literacy curriculum. And even funny we call them like data 101 and that's what everybody in the bank kind of the data literacy or basic data literacy program. And then the ambassador series was not one on one, it was 201, just like college when this is the advanced version of data training. So the one on ones they were for everybody in the bank and not for the ambassadors. This is a curriculum that was intended for everybody in the bank to see as a bank employee what are my roles and responsibilities towards data? If I am in the branch creating data, then this is. And we even customize that curriculum to the audience. So we have a 101 for all the kind of the juniors in the bank and then 102 for the managers and then 103 that was for branch and sales. Kind of the front lines of the bank who are dealing with clients. And each of those curriculums is kind of have the same concepts, but they're really customized towards the data scenarios that they deal with on a daily basis. For some managers, he's really looking for issues of how reporting is done. For frontliners or sales. We're really focusing on when entering client data, this is what you should be doing and so on. As for the 201 series, which is the other curriculum for ambassadors, we kind of customize that because these people do the day to day reporting and they do the analysis, they do the kind of crunching of data and that's where the Curriculum 201 is really focused on that type of work. When you're crunching data, how can you avoid kind of data quality issues, the redundant data, how to deal with it, what to do when there is a problem with a data source and there is some tooling aspect of it. So it creates concepts about data quality and cleansing, but also tools on what's best practices when dealing with big data, when dealing with kind of structured, unstructured data. Because these are people kind of the analyst and the data scientist of the bank.

Datacamp's mission is to democratize data skills for everyone, closing data skill gaps and helping make better data driven decisions. Data science and analytics are rapidly shaping every aspects of our data lives and our businesses. And we're collecting more data than ever before. But not everyone is able to efficiently analyze all that data to extract meaningful insights. Datacamp upskills companies and individuals on the skills they need to work with data in the real world. Learn more@datacamp.com and what type of tools.

Do you prioritize in the program? So for example, what's the split in terms of coding tools versus non coding business intelligence tools?

Right. And again, we have to kind of even slice and dice that further because in the bank we have like I said, 140ambassadors which vary in skills and based on their role, based on their skills, based on what type of work they're doing, the tools differ. So there are some kind of what we call the explorer analysts which are people who are just doing ad hoc reporting and kind of basic reporting. For day to day operational reports, I would call it. And these people were kind of trained on tableau for a tooling perspective. And then there are people who are kind of advanced or the power users where there is some R or Python that they have to do because they're building that into tableau. And these people kind of. When we did the ambassador program, we did the breakup for what I call them, the different batches or different groups. But then we kind of did another breakup where we had the power users versus the explorers. And then when we do the tool training, we change the whole structure. And it's nice because they get to see different people at different times. And that's the whole point, like I said of the community of ambassadors, I.

Love the granularity that you've applied in the program as a leader. How do you manage these types of cultural or transformation programs? What are some of the best practices that you can share around creating enthusiasm and excitement within the organization?

Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, that was one of the biggest things that we wanted to start with as you know, hammering down before we go into the curriculum stuff. Because I said, listen, whenever you say someone leave your job to go to a training, people just don't think that they're gonna go have fun in training. And if you tell them, okay, let's do this training online on zoom, they're like, okay, I can just turn it on and then kind of give it half of my attention and do other stuff. It's, it's that kind of stereotype of training not being always the things that, you know you'll go and have fun. And we wanted to like from day one on that training, we wanted to make sure we have exactly the opposite to make sure that they know that this training, how much does it impact them? Kind of giving them a sense of what they're learning in this is going to affect them as an individual, going to affect their department and the bank overall. So giving them the big picture help really those ambassador engagement to become really engaged. So one of the things that I highlighted on the first session is that you're going through this ambassador program and we're teaching you how to better use the data of the bank or better analyze and do all of the good stuff with data. Now this may help you as a department be more kind of creative with your data, be more efficient with your reporting and that will help kind of the bank bottom line. But at the same thing, once you learn this, there is, and I highlighted kind of different tracks for them on how they can get certified. How does this affect their career growth personally as an ambassador, as an employee, as an analyst? And we not just said, you know, with this ambassador program, you can do the certification. Oh, I had like three or four different certifications on that screen because some people are more focused on, for example, when I said tableau, there's tableau certification for analysts, but then there's some people who are really focused on kind of the data dictionaries or data governance and so on. And that's where we said, you know, there is the Dharma certifications where people love to get on that track. There is for risk people, there is tons of different risk specific data certifications. So a lot of people sometimes go on the training and yes, they know this is helping them do their to day job, but if they know there's something also in it for their career, that's that helps them really grasp that this is also valuable for me as an individual. And that's kind of once you get them hooked on the value of this. And then now that after we started the training, we really need to make it fun. People, I think were very excited when we did a lot of the props around the training and kind of give it that viral aspect. We had a lot of youth in this program giving them the analyst and most of them are juniors. So we wanted to make sure that any picture that we take during the program can become viral. And it really helped with previously when we had some people in the bank, they were saying, you know, Mae, I don't know if I should be part of this training. I really don't know about data or I'm really not a technical person. Why should I be an ambassador? I get these reports and I review them and that's it. I said, you know what, just attend the first session and we'll talk about it. So those same people that when they were saying, you know, at the beginning, am I able to come into the training or do that the next session? They were calling my team and they were saying, oh, when is my next session? I'm excited to learn more or do more because they understand that they're part of the learning of this is really kind of for them and that data is for everybody and not for the technical people in the bank.

That's amazing. And I really appreciate how you approach this with humanity and empathy and how you explain the value of acquiring these skills for your people and for their futures. Now, what do you find outside of skill transformation to be the most challenging aspect of cultural Transformation, I think, you.

Know, once, once we start with changing these cultures, I mean, technology is of course a major driver, you know, but being agile honestly is the main important part of being in a transformation and helping you transform faster. Because people have become impatient, I think, in the recent age, but they expect things to happen. And if you wait too long for that project to launch, people may just lose interest. I think the agile process have really kind of provided a great solution for this because now we launch something, we have some data to give us some feedback and then we prioritize, we kind of even optimize it further and do more. So the ability of becoming an agile organization I think really helps the transformation change. And in terms of whether it's culture or if it's technology or if it's abilities, even the people that they, once they get into that agile mode, they know that they're continuously shifting and they're able to accept changes faster. Prior to that, I mean, people hate change and they would resist it. Every time you change something, whether it's a system or a process, people will resist it and they'll get mad and you know, they try to stick to their good old ways but, you know, kind of confirming or kind of giving those people that we are going agile and this is how we become agile and that change is just the only constant and we can live with that. I think it will help people drive those, whether it's culture, whether it's process, whether it's anything, it's going to be people who become more flexible and more resilient to those changes.

That's awesome. And I feel like it must be harder to instill as a quality within the organization rather than data skills. For example, what are some of the tactics that you've used to reinforce agility and resilience within your teams?

So in terms of data skills, just whenever somebody hears data, they think it's technical, they think it's for geeks or even one of the management here. Like I really met your team and they're not really those data geeks with glasses. And I said, yes, we're not geeks and data is for everybody. It's not for just highly technical people. Anybody is somebody who's working with data. I said, even your branch teller, he is somebody who creates data. So he is a stakeholder in this data game. He doesn't need to be an engineer or a data scientist or a computer scientist. And that's kind of the things that we wanted to focus on when we did this training program. And aside from the training program, we were doing something called the data chat across the organization in our social channels, like internal social channels, to just make people hear that data is really for everybody. And as an organization, as we're transforming, data is becoming part of our regular kind of assets or things that we work with every day. Just like you sit on your computer, you realize how much data you're working with every day. So just the recognition that data is not really a technical thing, it's just whenever you're filling an account application for a client, you're working with data and that just helps them see how much this is part of our day to day work really.

Now, Mai, before wrapping up, I think what's exciting about the Data Ambassador program is that it really broadens accessibility and inclusion for data science within Gulf Bank. But I'd love to discuss how to broaden data science and STEM in general across the board. You know, both of us come from the Arab world and you being the first female chief data officer in Kuwait, I really admire your journey and how you've paved the way for other female leaders, especially from the region. What do you think needs to change so that data science becomes even more accessible and diverse today?

I think one of the things is we, you know, and to me, I was always passionate about, you know, having more women in tech. And now I like doing the same thing with women in data and just making it available for everybody, I think. And I remember when I first worked in tech, I was always the only girl when I was in college or in the IT department, the first department, I was always kind of, you know, it's hard for that inclusion to happen back then and 20 years ago, but I think right now it's much easier because when in my generation there was not no tech leaders who were women for us to look up to as young girls who's going into college or finishing high school or doing the STEM program, it was hard for us to find those kind of female leaders to look up to and want to be somebody, want to be like them. Right now it's so much different and I'm just very happy. And I think the way we're seeing how much leadership is being diverse right now is really a promising change. But I think one of the things that also organization need to invest in is to make sure that this leadership is 100% diverse. Because once you have that diversity and leadership, it will automatically reflect on the younger kind of staff and then that will kind of reflect on the overall kind of community or organization that we Have. And I think making it, as I said, like, when we're trying to do this ambassador program, we're trying to make data available for everybody, I don't think anybody will be afraid of data anymore. And that's how, once we try to normalize it, people won't be too kind of annoyed by saying, okay, you're working with data or afraid or kind of just scared of that, oh, I need to do this data thing. And the same thing we had with technical, where people are like, oh, I'm not technical. That's the first thing I hear with a lot of people when they talk to me. I'm not technical. I said, well, we're not talking tech here. And even, you know, if you, if you do some stuff on your computer, you might be doing already these technical things. So I think the youth, they, they do have a lot of more potential right now. Just because, you know, back in my age, there is not all these STEM programs going around for kids right now. My kids are 5 and 7, and, you know, there's some coding program that we're playing around with. I've never seen that back in my age. But now these programs are available, the tools are fun to do it. And I think once we have more kind of diverse leadership, I don't think we, you know, I think the future is much brighter.

That's amazing. Finally. Mai, any final words before we wrap up today?

No, just thank you, Dylan. Thank you, Data Camp for this, honestly. And I love how Data Camp is making data for everybody. That's something that I kind of preach for here, is that data is really for everyone. And we want to make sure that for the future that we're going into, for this digital future that everybody's going through, I think, like I said, data is not scary. Data is not too techie. Data is for everybody. And there's a lot of resources out there. If you have just a tiny interest, you know, learning something about it, whether online or in your organization, I think it will open up a lot of aspects in your career.

Thank you, Mai, for coming on Data Frame.

Thank you, Adiz.

You've been listening to Data Framed, a podcast by Data Camp. Keep connected with us by subscribing to the show in your favorite podcast player. Please give us a rating, leave a comment and share episodes you love. That helps us keep delivering insights into all things data. Thanks for listening. Until next time.