With headquarters in Boston and over 2,700 staff worldwide, Novanta is an $800 million world provider of laser photonics, precision movement management, and imaginative and prescient applied sciences. CIO Sarah Betadam, who joined in 2019 as VP of enterprise functions, after which turned world CIO in January 2021, is tasked with the strategic path, management, and implementation of the corporate’s digital transformation, juggling a number of initiatives concurrently, lots of which encompass efforts to develop into a totally purposeful data-driven enterprise.

“My group and I are very happy with our transformation that began in 2019,” she says. “Once I joined, there was plenty of silo knowledge in all places all through the group, and everybody was doing their very own reporting. So in month-to-month or quarterly mixed conferences, there weren’t apples to apples being in contrast. It was additionally plenty of churning for the completely different teams to provide you with these knowledge on the weekly, month-to-month and quarterly foundation.”

So from the enterprise aspect, there was plenty of inefficiency getting knowledge to the purpose the place it was presentable to completely different audiences, which introduced in its personal proper a giant enterprise drawback for Betadam. However the place to start?

“We began from a targeted enterprise case by partnering with three completely different teams to showcase how centralization of information could be environment friendly, useful, and a superb roadmap for the corporate,” she says. “You must construct belief inside stakeholders, and actually show you may assist them assist themselves. That’s the primary stage of a cultural shift. It took us about six months to do the proof of idea for 3 completely different enterprise items, but it surely was extremely profitable. In actual fact, the ROI was so excessive, we gained the belief of our executives to put money into a platform to start centralizing knowledge.”

CIO contributing editor Julia King just lately spoke with Betadam about Novanta’s unified shift from its fractured reporting tradition to a extra environment friendly data-driven group. Listed here are some edited excerpts of that dialog. Watch the total video under for extra insights.

On investing in capabilities: We’ve arrange one thing known as a BI Heart of Excellence the place we practice and have workshops and seminars on a month-to-month foundation that group members throughout Novanta can be a part of to find out about how they may leverage knowledge marts or knowledge sources to construct their very own reporting. So we have now a visualization layer the place we train completely different teams inside our group to be taught. It’s advanced from over the previous 4 years from having nothing and siloed knowledge units of spreadsheets and everybody doing their very own factor, to being centralized based mostly on KPIs and the belief in what they obtain from the info. They’re studying easy methods to visualize knowledge on their very own, in order that they don’t actually need IT apart from the info marts in an effort to construct their very own dashboards.