Building A Better Data Culture: An Interview With ThoughtSpot’s Cindi Howson

We sat down with Cindi Howson, Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot, the leading search and AI-driven analytics platform, for a wide-ranging conversation about her daily work, common challenges organizations face on the road to data democratization, and diversity in data science.

Over the past few decades, the world of data analytics has undergone transformation from a siloed entity to a cross-functional powerhouse. Now, in 2021, in this decade of data, the time is ripe for yet another sea-change, this time in the form of data democratization and accessibility.

Paving the way forward for this new movement towards actionable and accurate analytics is ThoughtSpot, and at the helm of the company’s customer enablement initiatives is Cindi Howson, Chief Data Strategy Officer.

Fresh off Snowflake’s $20M investment in ThoughtSpot, Cindi has been busy. From helping organizations more intelligently leverage their data to advocating on behalf of women in STEM, Cindi is one of the preeminent voices in data analytics. And for good reason.

Prior to joining ThoughtSpot, Cindi served as a VP at Gartner and lead author of the Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence. She also created the BI Scorecard, one of the first industry frameworks for evaluating business intelligence solutions. And now, at ThoughtSpot, she’s directing the conversation around what it means to build (and scale) data strategy across the enterprise.

We chatted with Cindi to learn more about her journey in data analytics, what’s top of mind for ThoughtSpot, and how the industry can make STEM more inclusive:

Throughout your career, you’ve assessed all sorts of BI and analytics solutions to help your customers better understand that landscape. Were there any industry trends that surprised you?

One of the biggest surprises to me is that we still are not good evaluating new technologies, as crazy as it sounds.

If you think about when the iPhone first came out, people were like, “Wait. Where’s my keyboard?” They were comparing it to the Blackberry. Even when the iPad came out, you’d say, “Wait, where’s that USB drive?” We keep wanting to fit things back into old evaluation frameworks. As a tech industry, we have to be aware of the limitations of old frameworks and how slowly they move.

One thing we care about is making analytics easy for everyone—taking the concept of consumer-grade ease, like Spotify or iTunes, and applying that level of ease to data and analytics. If nobody’s ever thought about that before, it may not even appear on your evaluation list. And I’m surprised that we still haven’t figured out how to do that any better as an industry.

Could you share a little bit more about your role today as a Chief Data Strategy Officer? It sounds like folks often make the mistake of thinking that you might be responsible for shaping your own company’s data culture internally, but that’s not the case at all.

So really, there are three facets to my role. One is working with our top customers, coaching them through roadblocks. And a lot of those roadblocks blocks are not technology—it’s culture. It’s people change management and data fluency, so I help them navigate these things. it also might be looking at what’s the right tool for the right user, and use case managing their BI tool portfolio.

But as I work with our customers, they will also give me feedback on where we need to take our product to continue to be the best and leading edge in the market. So I work with our product teams on either addressing gaps or charting the next wave of disruption and innovation.

And then the third part is really things like this, Barr—being a thought leader and meeting with people like you. So last year, one of my goals was to launch the Data Chief podcast, which I was able to do with the team, along with participating in events across the industry.