Catalog & Cocktails: The Honest, No-BS Data Podcast

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
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This is the takeaway episode with Shachar Meir, who 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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

Most companies slapping the "data product" label on existing data assets are fooling themselves. Bethany Sehon, Enterprise Data Leader at Capital One, has been building data products and ontologies in production long before they became buzzwords. Bethany joins Juan and Tim to share lessons learned: dedicated data product managers (not side-of-desk), ontologists treated as first-class citizens, a VP-accountable governance process, and much more.
Topics discussed:
Data products as a discipline, not a label
Governance process as the forcing function
Dedicated roles, not side-of-desk work
Ontology as a strategic function
Standardization is necessary but not sufficient
Less is more on scope
Trust is consumer-specific
AI expands what counts as a data product
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.