Treating data as a treasure is a foundational principle for Jan Sheppard, the Chief Data and Analytics officer at New Zealand’s Crown Research Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR.) This agency leads ongoing research in public health, environmental health, and forensics for the country of New Zealand. Like many other CDAOs, her role is relatively new. But the unique values she applies to data can be traced back many hundreds of years to the indigenous Maori people of her country. Through her work, Jan recognizes the profound impact data can have on people and their environments for generations to come. Learn more about the important climate and health policy challenges that ESR is working to solve with data in this episode, plus her take on data literacy vs. business savviness, and why her data strategy is just two pages long.

Key Moments:

00:00 Episode Start

07:12 How do you make vastly different data work together at ESR?

11:43 Data’s role as a treasure

13:50 How do government and private companies look at data differently

18:39 How do you guard against the misuse of data? (18:39)

21:16 Dangers of misinterpreting the models and the need for data-savvy (21:16)

25:10 Jan’s data North Star - recognizing the value of the data (25:10)

30:13 Goal to create digital twins to help address climate change (30:13)

34:05 Working around the difficulty of unstandardized ESG reporting (34:05)

40:35 Maori values and data at ESR - the life force of data (40:35)

47:35 Lightning Round

Mentions
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-Revolution/dp/1476708703
ESR's Data Strategy - https://media.thoughtspot.com/pdf/ESR-Data-Strategy.pdf

Get even more insights from data and analytics leaders like Jan on The Data Chief. https://www.thoughtspot.com/data-chief

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