Within the last decade, enterprises started to build portals, mobile applications, or anything they thought might engage customers on a sustained basis. But they soon realized those investments weren’t always converting to revenue and customer satisfaction.

Many secrets lie in consumer data, and thanks to the high availability to create and feed data anytime and anywhere, any business can have unparalleled insights about their customers or employees. Yet many organizations are struggling to get the most of their data to boost customer engagement, according to Sanjeev Vohra (pictured), global technology officer and global data business lead at Accenture Technology LLP.

“The reason why [customer engagement] is not happening is that the underlying data is not complete or comprehensive enough, or not accurate enough, for giving that experience,” Vohra said. “You have to look at data as well while looking at reforming your business services and offers to the client.”

Vohra spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the data-first approach, the importance of the chief data officer, and how Accenture is helping with the data-first revolution (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight:  I’d love to hear your thoughts about the data-first approach to digital transformation. First of all, what does that mean?

Vohra: In the last seven years, most bigger companies and businesses have invested in building better customer engagement. What they did was, they created properties, like portals, mobile applications, you name it, to just get a better sense and touch their customers better than they were touching earlier.

They looked at that technology process, [the] traditional model of looking at new businesses, the technology, people, processes. But now they’re looking at the fourth element, which is foundational data. That’s what we are calling the data-first approach.

Knight: Data is becoming a C-suite discussion, and there’s this growing need to appoint a chief data officer to drive data strategy. What do you see as the evolving role of the CDO at your company; and then also at the companies that you work with?

Vohra: We do believe, irrespective of who actually owns the agenda, whether a chief data officer or a CIO or a COO. They definitely need a person at the C-suite, not below C-suite, to have that discussion at the table and ensure that their data strategy is attached to their business strategy.

So we see a very important role. We also see who is in that role, [and] we think there are a few qualities that a person needs to have. We do believe that a person should be able to prepare a strategy and the governance of data across his or her peers. So they know what value they are able to get from that data and how they can share it across their functions.

Knight: Well that is certainly a theme that we’re hearing a lot about at Informatica World. Talk to me about the relationship between Accenture and Informatica.

Vohra: With our leadership … we do believe that we are at the surface of untapping the value. The second thing is, I don’t think that use cases will draw the benefit which large organizations are looking at. It has to be something done at the enterprise level. You need [enterprise data catalog]. You need that to not do one use case for one particular business, for one particular country, or one particular customer segment. We need to do that for entire businesses across the enterprise. That can only happen if you have a sense of data and you know how to do it effectively at scale.

Knight: I know that the workforce of the future is something that you’ve worked passionately on at Accenture. Tell us your story first in terms of how you came to terms with the skills gap, and what you did at Accenture to remedy it?

Vohra: We are a people-centric company. So we are 470,000 people; that’s a lot of people. One of the things in my role is to make sure that I look at all the investment we do on our people. So this came to me saying that OK, will we be relevant as 470,000 people 10 years from now because of AI, because of machine learning, because of people plus machine. What happens to our workforce?

We [learned that] we needed to work more closely with the machines. So, what skills will we need as humans to work with machines, plus new talent, which is required for the future? So we worked hard on this. We built a strategy on what we needed; then we did a very simple thing. We actually went to high-speed execution and agile sprints. We got a few principles [out of this]. One is the principle saying: There’s only a lot available in the market. So don’t spend creating stuff, but spend learning stuff. The second thing is we changed the mantra of our people vision, our employee vision. It used to be saying, that you need to perform and grow … we changed the saying to learn and grow. So we said learning is more fundamental because performance will become automatic when you learn more.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Informatica World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2019. Neither Informatica LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE