Patrick McGarry, Federal CDO at ServiceNow and author of The Adaptive Organization, has spent years watching organizations accumulate data and tools but fail to convert them into decisions. Overhead grows. Outcomes don't. Hence “Intelligence Without Action Is Just Overhead.” Patrick joins Juan and Tim to walk through why federal data programs stall (the idea-to-deployment lag is long enough that the tech moves on), why incentives matter more than mandates, and why the right question should not be "how do we get AI ready" and instead should be "how do we make our organization accountable for AI."

Topics discussed:

• Intelligence vs. action
• Ownership and outcomes
• Federal government's speed problem
• The CATALOG framework: Culture & Talent, Analytics & AI, Technology & Architecture, Alignment, Leadership & Governance, Operations & Delivery, Growth & Measurement.
• Governance as clarity, not bureaucracy
• Open standards, vendor lock-in, semantics, interoperability
• Regulatory standards as a double-edged sword

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This is the takeaway episode with Patrick McGarry, Federal CDO at ServiceNow and author of The Adaptive Organization, who has spent years watching organizations accumulate data and tools but fail to convert them into decisions. Overhead grows. Outcomes don't. Hence “Intelligence Without Action Is Just Overhead.”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shachar MEIR has spent 20 years fixing data teams and understanding why they fail. In this live episode, Shachar joins Juan and Tim to discuss the reason why they fail and what they should be doing in order to succeed.

Shachar argues that data leaders default to what they can control (cough cough technology_ and underinvest in people, process, and culture. A new CDO comes in, migrates legacy databases to a cloud data platform, and two years later you have the same problems on a better platform.

We get into what's actually missing: building trust in data (which takes time and breaks fast), creating incentives so people actually use what data teams build, and spending real time in the business which is not asking what dashboards they need, but what problems they have.

Topics discussed:

• Technology is not why data teams fail
• Why data leaders default to technology
• People, process and CULTURE
• Data trust
• Incentives
• Understanding the business
• Dashboard bloat
• Self-service analytics
• Dashboards aren't dead
• What CDOs do well and what they miss

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.