Data-Driven Work Cultures: Axway’s Patrick Donovan On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level
An Interview With Pierre Brunelle
Data regarding your customer transactions is gold. Treat it as such and learn from it as much as possible. Assign a team to do nothing but this. We are continuously building out this information set as we build our reporting team, and we’ve turned a key corner — where people are asking for more information!
As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Donovan.
Appointed by the Board of Directors on 9 April 2018, Patrick Donovan is committed to putting the finishing touches on Axway’s strategic project update and steering its implementation at the head of the company. He is an established “corporate entrepreneur,” working with organizations from technology startups to major divisions of international groups.
He brings his solid experience to a range of efforts that include stepping up Axway’s development, speeding innovation, and keeping the company ahead of the game in the ever-evolving middleware and digital business market.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I’ve been CEO at Axway for four years now and, before that, I was CFO here for almost 11 years. As you might expect, my background is in accounting, starting at a large public accounting firm then moving into industry. I have worked in tiny, four-person technology startups and very large airlines and media companies. Every step along the way shaped my career, leading to where I sit today.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
In accounting roles, there often are not many funny mistakes as the data and analysis provided are critical to running, measuring, and forecasting the results of the business. I do remember a mistake I made early in my career, where I provided a cash forecast to our CEO that was critical information for a Board meeting that day. Following the Board meeting, when the month closed, actual cash was far off. I had made a terrible mistake in my assumptions. I called the CEO at home late that night after validating my figures. I immediately owned the mistake and offered to send an immediate communication to the Board providing details. He was quite upset, but said he would handle it. There were big lessons I learned from this situation: 1) Own your mistake and do it quickly — mistakes don’t go away and owning them is the right thing to do; 2) Learn from the mistake and put in place changes so that you’ll never repeat it; and 3) If you do the right thing regarding a mistake, you find out a lot about whom you work with — the way they handle it when you take responsibility and do the right thing is revealing and important. Our CEO was clearly upset, as should be the case, and it put him in a tight spot. But shortly thereafter, I got more responsibility and respect, since he saw my passion and pride in what I did and knew he could trust me to tell him the truth no matter what. I was happy to work with him for many years after that early mistake.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
For just learning and hearing different perspectives and ideas, I like the long form interviews that Tim Ferris does in his podcast. But something that had a significant impact on me personally is a book by Dr. John Sarno called Mind over Back Pain. After experiencing years of back pain and undergoing surgery, I read this book on a recommendation and found the data and cases presented compelling. The shift it created in my mind and in the way I think about the power of the mind was amazing. In essence, this book helped me see the important role emotions and thoughts play in health. I never realized how interconnected the mind, the emotions and the body are until I read this book and several others in the field. And if you take the raw data and facts and analyze them without bias, you can change your thinking about the way things are and what to do about them.
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
Of course. In a software company, there are always exciting projects going on. As the business world continues to move toward the use of several major, competing cloud platforms, we continue to provide technologies and roadmaps that allow our customers to leverage the benefits of many different platforms, versus being locked into just one. We effectively allow customers to “Open Everything” with the infrastructure they have and with whatever else they want to use.
We’re also seeing major shifts in some of our systems that have been in place with customers for 20 or more years. Those exciting changes help them better use and transform the data in these systems to run their businesses more efficiently and securely.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” My work centers on the value of data visualization and data collaboration at all levels of an organization. So I’m particularly interested in this topic. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?
Every enterprise is swimming in data, whether they acknowledge it and whether they even retain it. Every customer order, every bill paid, every customer interaction, and so much else are directly impacting the data environment. Often in enterprises, everyone is so busy doing something that they will forget what information they have and what they can and should do with it. Axway, through its offerings, helps companies securely open everything in their enterprise — all of their apps and services — to integrate and move data through their complex ecosystems. If an enterprise can take this data and make it relevant to its business objectives, it can then start correlating and analyzing the information to make informed decisions. The power of the information it has collected will launch value-driving actions that will continue to improve the business, its operations and effectiveness.
For example, by analyzing customer satisfaction raw data that we collected and using it to make decisions to better improve our customer engagement on a daily basis, we have dramatically improved our customer satisfaction scores over the past four years. Without the core data to make these informed decisions, we would have just been taking actions in the dark, hoping they would work.
Which companies can most benefit from tools that empower data collaboration?
Frankly, I believe all companies can benefit from tools leveraging data collaboration. If you have collaborative data and analysis that yields insights about your business, you can learn from it and put in place actions that spur growth. The company will be better off regardless of the vertical in which it operates.
We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
We’ve been using data to drive our decisions for a long time and we hone our processes consistently as a result of that. Back in 2008, we performed an employee survey called the Axway Voice Survey. It was about 50 questions and it produced invaluable information — including an Employee Engagement score, based on raw feedback and information from the significant percentage of employees who answered the survey. As a leadership team, we analyzed the results and have put in place both corporate and local initiatives and teams to address several of the results each year in an iterative manner. We have seen significant improvements resulting in a more engaged workforce. We value the data and insights that the survey provides and include it every year in our planning period as we set priorities for the coming year.
Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations from your vantage point? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?
From my perspective, most organizations suffer from chronic analysis paralysis. It’s so bad that I have seen teams over-analyze and over-discuss even how to get started with making data-driven decisions. Or, they hope someone else gets started building the analyses, reports, and information that are helpful in making informed decisions. In my experience, it’s best to dive in and just get started. Collect the data, then do your best to scrub and analyze the data to produce information and measurements. Then, repeat the process, period after period, in a similar way so as not to bias the results. Even if the data is not 100% correct in an individual report, you can start seeing larger trends and movements that are present to help teams make informed decisions that would have never gained traction without starting on this journey. Further, the data and the analysis gets better as you get in the practice of using it and making decisions based on that data and analysis.
Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
Data regarding your customer transactions is gold. Treat it as such and learn from it as much as possible. Assign a team to do nothing but this. We are continuously building out this information set as we build our reporting team, and we’ve turned a key corner — where people are asking for more information!
Listen to the data collected from your employees. I believe most people really want to stay with and work for a company they are proud to be at and one where they participate in the daily journey. The employee surveys and informal ad hoc data collection that we capture form the basis of many decisions we make along our journey.
Data that speaks to market trends is invaluable for your product teams to analyze and use for decisions regarding where products need to go to meet the market needs in several years. Without this data, we would be guessing about future demand instead of making informed decisions. This data comes from both high-level market data collectors and from customers themselves.
Broader economic data is useful, but only to a point. Follow larger economic trends and data, but know those must be analyzed carefully. When some analysts say the economy is on a downward trajectory, we may have an opportunity to help our customers be more efficient. The same is true for many businesses.
Finally, once you get to the point of having good information and data and once you’re used to using it to make informed decisions, the next step is deciphering this data to predictively model the future. We are on this journey as we speak! This is powerful information.
The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven?
A data-driven culture must have buy-in from and be pursued by the leadership team. The data and information collected become powerful. If there is one set of data, with analysis that everyone must discuss, it aligns the power of the team. If the team is just making decisions by feeling alone and not held accountable to address the data, a lot of potential value gets lost in the discussion.
The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?
We already have a lot of data about the future of work. In fact, we have so much that any position can be supported with little effort. However, to be effective, the data has to be put together and analyzed without judgment or bias, and then good decisions can be made based on that information. Over the coming years, I think the simplification and ease of use of this data will be critical. We’ll find ourselves increasingly in remote work environments not able to discuss raw data in depth easily, so points will have to be made clearly in an easy-to-understand presentation layer.
Does your organization have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you?
As I mentioned, software companies are often working on exciting goals for the future. I can’t wait to see where the API and iPaas markets go. There are predictions about convergence, which I believe is here now. But what’s especially exciting is to see where this market and technology go in terms of an ability to open enterprise data through integrations across many systems in the enterprise. As this technology evolves, the data and its usage will become even more powerful than what we see today. This future is very exciting to follow and to help create.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Easily. You can follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thank you.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
