Tom Gottweis (pictured) had a CV of tech jobs as long as his arm when he became head of data strategy at Winsupply Inc., an industrial supply company, and found that technology is pretty much useless without a dovetailing culture.

“You can create the best systems, the best tools in the world, and if your users are unable to understand or to use what you’ve created, it really adds no value,” Gottweis said.

With experience as a programmer and software developer, he began wading into business, eventually seeing how tech and business must meet to influence outcomes.

This mindset embodies the mix companies need for the chief data officer or data strategist role, he stated. “It really lives with one foot in the technical world and one foot in the business world and serves to sort of unite those two functions,” Gottweis told Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during at Informatica World in San Francisco, California. (* Disclosure below.)

Though he reports to the chief marketing officer, customer experience is just one area of concern for him as a data strategist. His goal is to reform the decision-making processes to be evidence-based, rather than relying on people’s expertise and gut instincts, as Winsupply did in the past, he said.

This involves defining desired business outcomes, analyzing existing data for pointers to achieve them and putting in place the necessary projects and procedures, Gottweis explained.

Human interest story

The right technologies for data integration and analytics (in Winsupply’s case, one of those is Informatica Product 360 Information Management) help formulate evidence-based decisions, according to Gottweis. But he stressed that staffers must learn to take advantage of them.

“The other part of that is very much an educational role where your teaching the people out in the business to make use of those tools that have been created and how they apply particularly to their corner of the business,” he concluded.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE