Data Leaders Who's Who: Ram Kumar

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ram kumar

Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Cigna

In this article Ram draws on his 33+ years industry experience of which includes 28 years’ experience in the field of IT, 24+ years in the field of data and 20+ years in the field of AI to share the key traits of a solid data strategy, key attributes of a data leader and his insights into becoming a data-driven, intelligent organisation.

He has successfully operated in different and dynamic market conditions in various industry verticals and government organisations in over 40 countries including Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia, Pacific, Latin America and North America regions. Ram has successfully established businesses through international M&As and, JVs and managed its IT and data functions.

During this interview, Ram shares a wealth of information in answering the following questions:

How do you devise a data strategy? What sets apart the good from the bad?

Whether the larger goal of an organisation is to achieve “digital transformation,” “compete on analytics,” or to become “AI first;” embracing and successfully governing and managing data and using it in all its forms through a well-designed and implementable data strategy is an essential prerequisite.

A data strategy is a plan of data driven and data management initiatives that supports and enables your organisation’s business strategic goals. An effective data strategy focuses on improvements or changes to the organisation’s structure, processes, and policies to drive value creation through data, with the support of technology.

As a data leader, it is important to design a holistic data strategy for the organisation that is implementable in an incremental manner and that would enable data-driven business value creation.

Ram also shared his thoughts on:

• What are the essential qualities of a data leader?

• How have you found success in raising data literacy in your organisation? How do you get involved in educating peers and execs?

• What work are you most proud of?

• What do you wish senior leadership knew or understood?

• How do you build an effective data-driven organisational culture?

• How have you successfully accelerated new innovations to benefit customers or internal operations?

• How do you determine which projects to use AI for and how do you prioritise your projects?

• What have you found to be the key ingredients to make data analytics capability create an impact on business outcomes?

"I inspire my team and individuals to express themselves freely and bring out their best as a team and as individuals by providing them the right environment in which to do so."

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