Jul 2, 2026 · 47 min · 23 segments
Welcome back to an all-new season of *My Career in Data* – a DATAVERSITY Talks podcast where we sit down with professionals to discuss how they have built their careers around data. In this episode…
Shannon KempHostlike sales actually thinks about it differently to how our operations staff do you know they think about you know what it looks like for a client from a server perspective not a sales perspective so part of my role is is really around you know um just analyzing what we're doing how we're doing where we can improve and that's that's really helped um probably that second bit is around a lot of that research of you know analyzing how people talk about it and and how we can communicate why data governance is important is a big thing I'm doing at the moment is doing some surveys into how we can help professionals like you and I talk about why data governance is something we just have to invest in.
I mean, being, you know, a small company ourselves, you know, the irony of what we do, right, we still have to manage our own data.
And we did that a very similar exercise in the company to go through and decide what is the definition of customer, right? What is the definition of a customer for today diversity, and we have several definitions as well.
The thing that I like to say there is I think we forget to realize that data comes from people doing business.
They go, I'm going to run a sales campaign or I'm going to run a marketing campaign.
And I think for Dataversity, you didn't go like, we're going to get a whole bunch of data.
And to run a conference, we need attendees and we need to know about what food to serve them.
Okay, you know, normally I save this question for later in the interview, but I'm going to pull it up here now because it seems very appropriate to where we're going.
I think, like... you probably get a different definition every time you do this, which is probably really interesting.
And the reason, like the second question you probably want to ask is why do you define it like that is when we have all of this data, when we have so much data, I think that definition of tying it back to business outcomes is really important for helping us understand where the scope of data stops in an organization.
like sales actually thinks about it differently to how our operations staff do you know they think about you know what it looks like for a client from a server perspective not a sales perspective so part of my role is is really around you know um just analyzing what we're doing how we're doing where we can improve and that's that's really helped um probably that second bit is around a lot of that research of you know analyzing how people talk about it and and how we can communicate why data governance is important is a big thing I'm doing at the moment is doing some surveys into how we can help professionals like you and I talk about why data governance is something we just have to invest in.
I mean, being, you know, a small company ourselves, you know, the irony of what we do, right, we still have to manage our own data.
And we did that a very similar exercise in the company to go through and decide what is the definition of customer, right? What is the definition of a customer for today diversity, and we have several definitions as well.
The thing that I like to say there is I think we forget to realize that data comes from people doing business.
They go, I'm going to run a sales campaign or I'm going to run a marketing campaign.
And I think for Dataversity, you didn't go like, we're going to get a whole bunch of data.
And to run a conference, we need attendees and we need to know about what food to serve them.
Okay, you know, normally I save this question for later in the interview, but I'm going to pull it up here now because it seems very appropriate to where we're going.
I think, like... you probably get a different definition every time you do this, which is probably really interesting.
And the reason, like the second question you probably want to ask is why do you define it like that is when we have all of this data, when we have so much data, I think that definition of tying it back to business outcomes is really important for helping us understand where the scope of data stops in an organization.
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