 Hello and welcome to Data Diversity Talks, a podcast where we discuss with industry leaders and experts how they have built their careers around data. I'm your host, Shannon Kemp, and today we're talking to Nick Acheson, the Chief Data Officer at Okara. Welcome, my name is Shannon Kemp, and I'm the Chief Digital Officer at Data Diversity. This is my career in data, a Data Diversity Talks podcast dedicated to learning from those who have careers in data management to understand how they got there and to be talking with people to help make those careers a little bit easier. To keep up to date in the latest in data management education, go to DataDiversity.net forward slash subscribe. Today, we are joined by Nicholas Acheson, the Chief Data Officer at Okara. Normally, this is where we podcast host would read a short bio of the guest, but in this podcast, your bio is what we're here to talk about. Nick, hello and welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. So Nick, Chief Data Officer at Okara, what is it that you do? That is an awesome question because I have found that Chief Data Officers vary widely in their responsibilities. The exciting part of that is normally it's tied to the maturity of the company, and that's no different than my role here at Okara and where we are as a startup. So I'd say this next year, I'm spending a lot of time focusing on how are we thinking about the integrations and patterns and then really enabling our customers to be able to deliver in this new world of data mesh and data fabric and distributed data sources. So I'm working a lot with our sales team as well as with our current customers to really continue to build out what a maturity process and map would look like and how to deliver business results faster through that process. Now, next year, I probably shift back in more internally focusing on platforms and technologies. But for now, I think that's our number one priority right now is really, especially in the environment we're in, making sure that we're setting up our current and prospective customers for success. Like it and to put that framework, to put that into perspective, I should say, so tell me a little bit about Okara and what the company is that you are working at. Yeah, the easiest way to think about us is a dynamic access platform. So I think most of the folks that are probably even clicking on your site are really trying to navigate this in the world we're in right now not having enough people and resources but having way too much data. How do I start thinking about interacting with data as an asset across my ecosystem regardless of where my data is? So Okara, our sweet spot really is if you're in like Databricks and Snowflake and AWS and GCP for your compute capabilities. We enable our customers to be able to create one policy that effectively integrates in every data source that they operate against. So instead of having millions federated and distributed that are very hard to audit and manage, we've got a very simple UI and enable stewardship at scale as data continues to scale, frankly, with less people. Very interesting. And I love that even a data vendor sort of speak has a chief data officer just goes to show that how important data is. Yeah, what's the fun is I just joined Okara about a month ago and I've been a customer of Okara even pre money of Okara when they were a very early startup. I actually brought them in with an idea as we were building out our data mesh before data was kind of a term. So it's a nice full circle to come join this side of the table and it's pretty exciting for me. Very nice. So I don't imagine that when you were very young and you're as a child that you imagine I'm gonna be a chief data officer for Okara when I grow up. So what was your goal when you were a child? What did you wanna be when you grew up? Yeah, that's a funny question because I guess you'd say is I matured into two before I matured into the career that I had. So when I'm younger, right? Like any other kid, I want it to be a professional baseball player, right? And it's just like, but then you start realizing, I don't know if I wanna be playing around in AA and AAA living in hostels and maybe making money and maybe get there one day. So before I got to college that dream kind of became more of the, is that really what you wanna do? And then I'd say as I came into college I was actually a philosophy undergrad major. I read all my philosophy books even actually before I even went to my undergrad first class and my goal was to be a research traveling professor around philosophy of mind and neuroscience and identity. So it's a fun full circle around working for an identity authorization company but yeah, that was my route up until I met my wife, late junior year of college. And we all realized again, I don't know if I wanna eat peanut butter jelly sandwiches until I can get tenure and enough books published. So. Sure. So then what'd you do? How did you get from there to your current role? Yeah, I went to a small and very intentionally a small school for my undergrad so I could just work towards my master's degree in parallel in publications. And I did that right outside of the Northern Virginia area in DC area. And if you look at my profile, you can quickly see I basically worked, I shipped over and started working at NSA right after graduating from college. So as it on the vendor side because most of the folks on the inside are mostly doing acquisition. So it was really fun, those same concepts of philosophy of mind of distributed systems and understanding how brain waves and connectivities impact motions and so forth. Like I love that systems thinking and systems approach. And so it was a very natural movement for me to move into tech at the agency. And right as they were coming into, you know big data before big data was a term and trying to figure out like what is the cloud and how do we leverage it? Those are really fun things for me because I just looked at the agency and the intelligence community itself as a large system. And how do you think about the interaction of those systems and optimize? Very interesting. So I think we're kind of missing a step though like how did you get into the tech? I mean, it sounded like a, were you always interested in tech? Was that just kind of a subtext always to go from philosophy to, you know I mean, you mentioned that you were in the science. Yeah, no, this is where my dad will laugh when he listens to this podcast. He always thought I'd be a weight guesser at Carnival when I told him I wanted to be a philosophy major. So he's in tech, you know 25 plus year Navy veteran moved into tech and then it was kind of always in the background of hey, you could apply those things here you don't have to go work at the Carnival. So I finally junior year was like, all right fine I took a next turn ship down by the agency and next thing you know, I just rapidly continued to, you know blessed to be having great mentors early on in my career that gave me opportunities I probably didn't qualify for. Nice, nice, very nice. So, so then where did you go from there from the agency? Yeah, I did about a third of my career in the agency about 10 years or so back to my wife all things go through family. We had our second kid and I'm spending, you know 18 hours in basements or proposal rooms or otherwise without accessibility. And, you know she just asked me is this the kind of family that we want to raise and is this the lifestyle we want? And obviously the answer was no. So we packed up our bags I folded up my company at the time and literally with like a 45 day notice we moved out West and then I decided to go commercial. So I was kind of like phase two of my career is I really kind of went around as like this hired assassin trying to help companies figure out how do you move to the cloud what challenges are you going to run into? Cause frankly I've come to terms with this I'm not going to see the kind of challenges I saw at the agency anywhere else in the world. So if we can build it there everyone else has a much easier roadmap to be able to get there and then that's where it's just really helping companies connect into mission and business and go to technology is easy part if you know the patterns it's really about how do we unlock the business? So I went through quite a few companies there I was at Phillips basically traveling around building out that integration strategy and migration path. I spent some time at concur fixing some of their hateful eight problems that we used to call it in terms of helping them scale but also adjusting to GDPR. I like to say I did my tour of UNICEF by spending some time at Premier Blue Cross trying to help make healthcare work better by creating an open API ecosystem. So really just working on extremely hard problems but again, more in that like research enablement transformation phase but I'd say I became the leader that I'm still growing into when I went to Nike and ran to enterprise data platforms there. And that's when I really shifted from hard problems to building teams and organizations and really helping an organization transform not just do some really cool products and driving good experiences for a customer but how do you do that holistically? So what then? It's so obviously you work a lot with data and have for most of your career then so what is your definition of data? Oh, wonderful question. I kind of didn't wanna answer this one and I was thinking about like back like talking around it. I talk a lot about like data as an asset, right? And what does it mean to create data as an asset? But I think your question fundamentally goes what even is data, right? And thank you for scratching my philosophy at cheer. But I like to say like classically data was I'd say it used to be a byproduct of the business. And what I mean by that is sometimes it was very intentional to help make decisions but we knew they weren't really data-driven decisions. It was really like looking at, hey, what happened when we did this? And a lot of it was descriptive types of analytics all driven by just open data. And I think the world's making a shift now to go, no, data itself is the asset. Now, how are you trying to use that asset? What am I allowed to use that asset for? How does that, what happens when I apply that asset to other assets and like giving it the respect it deserves? And I think that's the space I think that we're in right now. And if you think about it that way it's like systems themselves, right? And just the core nature of data. In my mind, a whole ecosystem is data, right? How do we interact? How do we connect to applications? It's through identity of data and individuals. How do we authorize them? It's understanding the tags and the attributes associated with that asset. And so for me, I'd be like everything we interact with is either creating, generating, or foundationally driven by what we call data. But in my mind, it's again, it's like every interaction that we and systems have with each other is creating that content. And it's valuable and it needs to be protected at the same time too. Makes sense. With a robust catalog of courses offered on demand and industry leading live online sessions throughout the year, the Dataversity Training Center is your launchpad for career success. Browse the complete catalog at training.dataversity.net and use code DVTALKS for 20% off your purchase. Certainly appreciate that definition. And do you see the importance of data management in the number of jobs working with data increasing or decreasing over the next 10 years and why? I'm gonna intentionally not answer a somewhat different question. Like clearly it's going to continue, right? Like data is not going anywhere. It's getting more core. What I think is, I think we're gonna see a continued evolution around how do we interact with data and how does that change the jobs associated with data? I had a great conversation with my wife about this as we were talking to our girls. I have a nine and a seven year old. And when we talked to them, I was like, look, everything you are going to do by the time you grow into your career, data is gonna be at the core of it. It's either an enabling function or it's an output that you can think about as an asset and how you interact with other organizations. So regardless of what you do, even if you wanna do ballet, like understanding and optimizing your jump and so like there's so much science behind all that. So I think we're gonna continue to see a churn in how we interact with data, more specifically much more natural language processing, right? I think you've seen ThoughtSpot for example, blow up because how do you create more citizens analysts that are trusted and protected because they don't know the rules, they don't know data ethics and things like that. So I think we're gonna see more technologies continue to abstract out those hardcore data roles like data engineers and so forth. And more so go like, how do I put the right tools in people's hands that I can make seven data engineers feel like 700 and not treat 700 people like data engineers. So I think we're gonna see that change. And I think that's gonna continue to evolve the workspace, but everybody's gonna have to have some kind of STEM or STEAM type of background. Very interesting. Yeah, so you see a good place for data engineers any other data roles types that we'll see need more of or be creating more efficient rules for? Yeah, I think we're gonna continue to see those other peripheral roles get closer to data. And so that's where I think data is gonna be a foundational need for every role. So even as a lawyer, right? And going, you think about data permissibility and its impact on our products and how we think about and protect our customers as much as we protect the assets that we have. So I think we're already seeing that. But yeah, I think you even see roles like analytics engineer, right? How do you, can you describe the difference between analytics engineer and a data engineer if you're not in a hardcore data organization? So I think these are the ones are like, we might see roles shift, right? And see more data engineer shift into that because now we're thinking about the enablement of data versus just the acquisition of data. So I think we're gonna keep seeing those roles shift out. We continue to see the blurring lines between BI analyst and insights analysts and the data scientists, right? They continue to walk up the maturity path. So that's either gonna be career progression or it's gonna be hyper focus and then go, great, now what's the interaction with that with all the other data assets we have? I love it. So what advice then would you give to people looking to get into a career in data management? So I think we still see two differing paths in data management, right? There's the one side which is just the hardcore, can I, how do I get data? How do I enrich data? How do I protect data, store data and then enable the use of data? That's just the basics. This is how you operate an ecosystem. Now in there, I would put in the analytics teams and so forth, but we've seen this massive explosion on the business side with data. And that's not just your sales people shouldn't be SQL experts, like put that aside we're gonna mature out of that soon, right? But like true on governance, right? Everybody's talked about for years of how do I create data contracts? How do I get governance in the business? So my data engineers aren't providing data access requests and so forth. But the tools before never really enabled that for most governance folks that you meet frankly like they've come out of project management or program management or they're really coordinating with the business. And I think those kind of roles are gonna continue to expand like mentioning the legal part. I think every large enterprise organization now has a council tied to data. And so I think those are gonna be really interesting to see is like as you drive your individual careers do you wanna be on the technical side? Do you wanna be on the business side? Or is it on the enablement piece? And there's fungibility between those but there's a massive need especially on the business and enablement. Did you know Dativersity offers free monthly webinar series and online conferences throughout the year? Stay in the loop when you follow us on Twitter at Dativersity or on Instagram at Dativersity underscore edu. Get podcast extras and bonus content when you subscribe to our channel at youtube.com slash Dativersity. Very interesting. We've heard still a lot of companies resistant to the word data governance. They think it's, it is just following the law it is just the things something that you have to do and it's kind of a dirty word. So what advice would you give to executives who are not quite there yet or what is it about data governance that is so important on the business side? Yeah, I think so one of my headaches as running data analytics teams and priorities and so forth it was always, I take for example, Zendesk. When I was at Zendesk, we had over 250 SaaS applications powering Zendesk over seven of them were processing data and enriching and serving your own insights. And like, how do you protect all of that? How do you maintain visibility of all of your data assets across that full spectrum? Let alone somebody's publishing a report out there and I'm the data analytics organization everybody's gonna assume that those reports are coming from us certified by us or otherwise. And I have no way to even authenticate any changes that we make in that logic. So just the simple things like business terms and glossary who owns the definition of sales in North America? Who owns the changing of that definition of sales in North America? Like a Nike when Footlocker data was coming back depending on where it came from they changed the colors definition and in Texas they called a basketball shoe a lifestyle shoe but in California they called it a basketball shoe but in New York they changed the colors and the definition and it came back different enriched who owns the actual decisioning on maintaining and normalizing that. And that's the simple piece of like you gotta get your financial data, right? And that's where I think we're on the trend right now is you still have a lot of governance folks in the finance org because that's where you start, right? Like if your K-10s off and your definitions change and your forecast change like good luck and I hope socks doesn't beat you up too bad. But I think on the other side is yeah like how do you manage that at scale? You know, if you're especially an enterprise organization like a Pepsi how do you do that across all those systems maintain consistency even as the data moves in and out that's definitely on the enablements and business side and those business owners are accountable for what those metrics actually say. So there's no better place to have that in there. So even if you like don't have engineering teams in the business or you do or otherwise there still has to be consistency across the enterprise and we all know things now are fully connected end to end whether we want to admit that or not. Very, very sound advice indeed. Well, Nick thank you so much for this great interview and information. So I would be remiss however I didn't ask how people find out more about Okara. Yes, there's the obvious one is the okara.com. It's if it make it easy it's ok era. So we're here to make things ok and trust and build with our customers and yours. So I'd say check out there. I also just published a white paper on there too on the role and evolution of ABAC versus RBAC especially folks who are getting into the space to see and I really broke down the history of like how did this come out from data lakes to distributed to mesh and where's the space going and frankly called a couple cool companies out there that are really driving and enabling. So I think the first part of this is really just education understanding where we really are and then go great. Now how can we make an impact on that? I like it very nice. Well, Nick thank you so much and thanks to all of our listeners out there. And if you'd like to keep up to date on the latest podcast and the latest in data management education you may go to dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. Until next time. Awesome, thanks Shannon. Thank you for listening to Dataversity Talks brought to you by Dataversity. Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and information about our free educational articles, blogs and webinars at dataversity.net forward slash subscribe.