Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good whatever time it is, wherever you are in this amazing planet of ours. I am Malcolm Hawker. I’m the host of the CDM Matters podcast.

I’m also the chief data officer of Profisee, the entity that is bringing this podcast to you. We make amazing MDM software. So if you ever have questions about MDM, hey, hit me up on LinkedIn. Happy to answer.

I’m excited for today’s episode of the podcast. We’re we’re gonna talk today with Dora Boussias, who is starting her own business, DORB GLOBAL.

But she’s an established data leader. She’s been around the block. She had a long and great career with Stryker. We’re gonna talk to Dora about her transition to different things and running her own business. And this is something I know that a lot of data leaders have thought about because they’re telling me. They’re kind of pulling me aside at events or conferences and saying things like, Hey, how do I establish my brand?

I’d love to start a podcast. How do I do stuff like that? How do I become more noted?

How do I become a thought leader? How do I basically branch out on my own?

A lot of people are asking me these questions, so I’m excited to talk today with Dora. Hey, thanks for joining us today, Dora. Good to see you.

Good to see you too, Malcolm. I’m excited to be here. Thank you.

We’ve we I don’t know when we met in person.

Maybe a couple of years ago, Gartner?

In person? The first time we met in person?

I think so. Gartner. Right? Doesn’t that make think so?

No. We maybe. I mean, we also met at DJI Q. I I don’t know. We True.

And we spoken virtually before a few years now, a couple of years.

Yeah.

I’ve I’ve come to, know and respect Dora for a lot of different reasons. She’s a great speaker, extremely charismatic, very well spoken.

And one of the reasons why is because we share a little bit of common history. Dora and I both left our homelands, we both left our comfort zones and our families in other countries to come to the United States and and grab the the brass ring. So so, Dora, I’d I’d love to hear a little bit about your story. But let let’s start there.

How did you get here? How did you get to where you are? What led to the Dora we know now?

Sure. Thanks, Malcolm. Wow, yes, that is a big milestone because I was literally a teenager. It was after high school, but I was seventeen. I graduated a year I was always a year younger than all of my classmates.

So at seventeen, I came here from Greece, where I was born and raised, to go to college. I wanted to study computers.

There weren’t good schools, especially more so on the hardware side, but not so on the software development side that I was interested in, so I decided to come here. And I have a couple of siblings that were here before me, but with the purpose of come here, get an education, then go back to Greece, where my parents were.

Turns out thirty six years later, I am still here.

I got the first degree. Actually, I got a two year associate’s, very technical degree, went to a bachelor’s, then I did my MBA and continuing.

But then my internship, to get the credits, to get my bachelor’s, my internship turned into a full time job offer. So then I started my career in technology, and then life happens, family, children, work, and like I said, here I am. But you’re right to bring that up because it is a very big milestone in my life, and it definitely plays to being an immigrant. I don’t know about you, Malcolm. I know, you know, you share that part of the story, but even starting in technology, I remember very vividly, I’ll share the story with you. When I first started in, in technology, I used to speak with my hands a lot. I’m Mediterranean.

Like body language, like talking with my hands is something that I do. It’s part of how I speak. And I remember people telling me first of all, I remember people watching them watch my hands versus listening to what I’m saying and looking me in my eyes, right? And I remember people telling me, put your hands down. You don’t do that in corporate, you know? And I tried it for a while.

Yes, I had someone tell me this as an advice, and I did that for a while. I tried to hold my hands down and speak, and it came across as very, not me. It wasn’t confident. It was shy. It was a shaky voice. I wasn’t being myself.

The funny thing about that story is fast forward thirty six years later, because this just happened a few months ago. I was speaking with a friend of mine, and I said to him I had just rolled out my website because like you said, I moved out of corporate to entrepreneurship, and I said, Hey, would you mind taking a look? Tell me what you think. And I have a video on there, and he said, Well, this is everything good, gave me a couple of points, but he said, You know, in your video, there’s been a study that scientifically now proves that when people see your body language and your hands moving, it actually instills more trust and credibility, and you should show more of that.

You should record this video again and and put your camera down to show more of your body, not just, you know, chest up. And I chuckled. I thought that was so funny because it was on one hundred and eighty from where I started, what I was told, to now telling me, no, it’s the other way and there’s science behind it to tell you it’s good. But, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey and I’m grateful for all of it.

I’m sure we’ll talk about it.

Yeah. It’s it’s interesting. The the subtle little shifts in in moving from countries and and people would assume, oh, well, Canada, that’s the same as the United States. But I encountered numerous similar examples.

No talking with the hands for me. I’m kind of Scottish Irish descent and and we’re very not like that.

But one of the things that I had a hard time adjusting to is when I came to this country, talking about politics, right? Like where I’m from. That’s a normal conversation. Like you just, Oh, hey, let’s go for a beer after class. Because I was in graduate school.

Yeah.

And, Hey, let’s go for a beer after class and talk about it. And I would just start going into politics and the entire table just shut down. Like nothing, right? And they’d be looking at me like, Who invited this guy?

Right? Just talking about politics. So these little subtle things, you you may not necessarily appreciate until you’re there and until you do it and until you’re, you know, engrossed in in this in this other world. But, you know, I was on a podcast yesterday, and somebody asked me, you know, what what’s the one piece of advice?

And if that’s a really, really hard question, I’m gonna ask you the same question maybe later on.

And he asked me, what’s the one piece of career advice? And the thing that I said is go on an adventure.

Get out of your comfort zone. Just just get just challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone and go on an adventure.

And I went on one. I’m still on it. And that’s what you did as well. And so so what what what what did you learn the most about yourself in that in that in your adventure? What did you learn the most about, you know, maybe your resilience, maybe your ability to change? What did you learn that you didn’t know before?

You mean throughout my career, throughout my journey, which is all the time or In the change, right?

In in in go in being in a comfort zone and friends and family and language and culture and then just being plopped somewhere completely different. What Yeah. What what what did you learn the most about yourself in all of that?

Well, change is hard for sure. Even if people that gravitate towards this, this is not easy for anyone. And this comes from someone that has driven change on the global level because in my career, I’ve done a lot of work with data governance and who wants to talk about data governance or even bring it? I know you do, but most organizations want to just go build the shiny thing and not talk much about data management, data governance, MDM, things that really take a lot of intention and hard work and getting people together, and it’s driving a lot of change.

So this coming from someone that I actually embrace change right now because I’m so used to it and I’ve driven it. What I learned the most about myself from that is that, yeah, at the end, you know, definitely resilience, definitely well, let me take a step back and say it this way. Change is going to happen no matter what. So, the biggest lesson that I’ve had, and I don’t know if that was a lesson about myself or a lesson from that experience, is that I either embrace it and I work with it, or then I’m gonna be stuck because change is gonna happen either way.

And, in fact, I’m gonna share something a friend of mine said. He said, even standing still is going backwards.

Because exactly change is going to happen. So, even standing still, everything else moves forward. It’s kind of like when you’re at the train station, you either get on the train and you go, or you stand there, which is actually going backwards, because the change will happen, the train will leave. Right? So the biggest lesson, when I get comfortable with the idea of it’s going to happen, I accept it, so what am I going to do about it? Makes things a little bit easier.

I learned to expect the change and expect the pushback, and that helped me actually do better even with driving change or going through it myself.

It’s funny you did mention that because that’s something that I say in my book related to the status quo, which is if we you know, you could ask the question, okay, well, if things are working, what’s wrong with the status quo? Well, by definition, exactly what you just said, if we’re if things are constantly changing, technology is evolving, the world is changing, everything’s changing. I mean, you can’t argue that. It’s changing at a pace like we’ve never seen before.

So if you’re not moving, right, if you’re literally not moving and if you’re not changing, then you’re falling behind because you need to change to keep just simply to keep pace. So I I I love that perspective, and that’s the problem with the status quo is that you will, in time, you’ll be you’ll be falling behind because you’re not keeping pace. So, yeah. Oh, I I I I love it.

And and I love the perspective of of resilience.

You know, for me, what what I learned is that I was capable.

Right? And and that and that and that but, you know, at the time though, and at at that age, I didn’t think much of it. I just thought I would just go on an adventure and I didn’t it’s it’s really looking back. It’s the age that gives me the wisdom to be able to say, wow, I was actually far more capable than I thought I was.

But, anyway, I love I love I love that shared go ahead.

Yeah. I was gonna say, Malcolm, definitely. You know? You say capable. Absolutely. Like, we can do hard things.

I recall when I first came and I started college, literally, I got here February. And a couple of weeks later in March, I started college because it was a trimester system still that year.

A hundred percent of what I would hear my professors say, I would translate it from Greek to English and write it one hundred percent in Greek. And I’m the kind of person that even today, I take notes, I write, and I need to write on a piece of paper, not digitally, because it helps me retain the information.

I take a lot of notes, so one hundred percent, whatever I could understand, which was not a lot. So now looking back, I wonder sometimes, how did I even go through that? Because it was tough, especially the first year, first couple of years, and I’ve said this before, The first couple of months, maybe three months or so at the beginning, I said nothing other than hello, goodbye, thank you. I hardly understood anything that I was hearing, totally translating everything. Little by little, that got better, And that’s hard, thinking about it, looking about, you know, reflecting on this now. I wonder, wow. But it’s exactly what you said.

We we handle things. We deal things when they come our way. Right? And for me, I’m very goal oriented. My goal was to get the education, to use that, to go ahead in my life with, you know, whichever my goals were. So for me, no matter how hard it got, I had a goal to reach, and that kept me going, and I would get up every day. And that, I think, is probably my secret too in terms of how do I stay resilient, because we’re talking about change and resilience.

Well, for me, I need to have a target, and it needs to be clear.

Like, I need to know where I’m going, what is my goal. And I think, if I can just add this on, a lot of what I’ve seen people do, and I coach many people these days, a lot of what I see people do is that there is no clarity. They’re just, we’re just going sometimes through motions, even with our careers.

We’re just going through the motions. We just let life happen. We just let career happen. It’s almost as if we’re a spectator, passive sometimes, versus really taking a very intentional, view of things. And like I like to say, sometimes being the captain of your ship and taking it where you want to go. But in order to do that and be the captain of your ship, you have to have a destination so you know where you’re going, otherwise, how do you know you’re going to get there? And that for me is my motivator, what gets me going every day, even when things get hard or things change change all the time.

So what was let let’s move on now to kind of your transition from being a data and analytics professional, working for a large company, to branching out on your own.

What was that oh, and by the way, I completely agree with you on have on having a, a well defined target. Right? Have having a goal. Could could not could not agree more.

What I know from my personal experience is that previously, for years, years, my only goal was get a green card.

Right. I’ve been there. I know. Right.

Literally, that was my only goal. Make sure I can get a green card so I don’t get get get kicked out of the country.

And in retrospect, completely wrong goal. Like, completely wrong goal because I was I was managing my career from the perspective of fear And not from the perspective of attainment, not from the perspective of where I wanted to go. I was basically fearful of getting kicked out of the country, and that was the only thing that was motivating me was not getting kicked out of the country. I succeeded.

Yes. But but I think my career was significantly limited along the way because I wasn’t shooting for something else. I should have been something for shooting for something that is is more positive, and more you know, instead of being fear based, I should have been goal based. So I I I I’ve lived it as well.

Looking back with with, you know, with the wisdom of age, it’s like, man, that was kinda dumb.

Say you know, basically taking a position of don’t lose.

Instead, I could’ve had the position of here’s how I wanna win.

Oh, yeah. Because, I mean, you know this. Right? The mindset, how we look at things, where we’re coming from. I think both consciously and subconsciously, it really changes the way we interpret things, the opportunities we go after, how we articulate things, who we choose to talk to or not talk to, event to go to or not go to, what job to go for or not go for. I mean, all the micro decisions that we make every day, I’m a firm believer that the mindset on how we approach things, subconscious level even, it has a big impact to how our trajectory, goes forward.

Oh, there there is there is plenty of research behind what you just said. There’s plenty of research that says, you know, the power of intention is very real. Right? If you if you put yourself in a certain position, you mentally put yourself in a certain position, work yourself backwards from what is it gonna take for me to get from where I am to where I want to be, but see literally see yourself in that position.

See yourself as the CEO or the VP of data and analytics. See yourself doing that job. Like, that there is true data that suggests the that that type of intention is incredibly, incredibly powerful, and the the world will find a way put you in that CEO chair or that VP of Denali’s chair. So I I I love it.

What what was the is there, like, a was there, like, a lightning bolt? Was there some sort of, like, moment for you when you were, like, okay.

I’m done in my corporate career. I’ve done some great things. I’ve achieved some things, built and managed teams. Now I got to do something else. What was that? Was there a catalyzing event or was there a lightning bolt? What happened?

There was. There actually was. So I love what I’ve done. I I love what I do, and it’s all about data and AI, also leadership career, helping either organizations or people, right? And I always thought, I love what I do. I know I wanna work well into my seventies.

If I don’t use it, I lose it. I have way too much energy, and I’ll keep going. And then I hit fifty. I’m in my mid-50s right now. And at fifty years old, what happened, it’s not that I turned fifty, it was a set of circumstances that maybe helped me understand that life really is short. I came back from Greece, and within a month, I found out, I heard that two of the cousins that I was just talking to a month earlier in person both had cancer.

And all of a sudden, what we say that life is short, which we all say it, but I don’t know how much we really have digested what this really means. That was one, you know, event that really just shook me, and I thought to myself, Well, I may never live to be fifty. Because then, once you start internalizing these things, then you start paying attention. All of a sudden, the things that you saw before and you didn’t really see, they actually make more sense now.

Then I started hearing about, oh, and this person had an issue, and that person left and was too young, and life really is very short. So, then I said to myself, okay, at fifty, I said, by fifty seven, I gave myself a target, by fifty seven, first of all, I can be, I can have energy and help organizations, people, what I do, not just in this, but I want more control over my schedule. So I said by fifty seven, I want to get to a position where if I make not a cent for the rest of my life that I’m able to take care of myself because that will give me flexibility to have more control over my schedule so I can spend more time with my loved ones.

And yes, I can do what I love, which is at the very core helping other people with the things that I know, data, AI, leadership, outside of a big corporation as well. I spent thirty years working, like you said, Stryker, Prudential, big companies.

So, that was the big turning point for me. But I’ll tell you this too, Malcolm, what happened. At fifty one, I said to myself, because now I had a goal. And now, at fifty one, I said, How can I pull that in?

Does you really have to be fifty seven?

And at fifty one, I said, okay, I’m going to target for fifty five.

And basically, at fifty three, I pulled the plug and I said, okay, I am doing it. Obviously, I had to feel comfortable that I had runway because when you live something that you’re comfortable with, I left a corporate job for thirty years that was salary with benefits, and I was living in a senior leader role, I had a comfortable compensation, right? To live that, to start from scratch, with no paycheck coming in for the first time in thirty years, I mean, it’s not just something that you just, okay, it’s yet another big change. But at fifty three, I, you know, I gave my notice and I left corporate. It was very intentional, and it’s been now about thirteen, going on fourteen months now since I made that pivot.

And here we are. I, you know, the moment so I have another friend that says this, thought, word, deed.

Thought, word, deed. And I need to give George Lucares credit for that one as well because it’s we think it, right? So I thought about it. I gave myself my target. I actually said it out loud or I said it to myself and basically took action and made it happen.

And that’s how it came about.

Awesome.

So what you just said is for three years I don’t know if it was the full three years or if it was two, two and a half. But for a decent chunk of time, you were laying the groundwork to go from the steady paycheck to, you know, not having the steady paycheck.

So tell me what that three years look like. What were you doing? So you had the intention of doing your own thing. You always knew that you wanted to do your own thing.

What were the goals that were bound up in that three year period? Right? Was that just building up building up your bank account? Was that, like, the stuff we do on LinkedIn?

What what what what was involved in that?

So, definitely making sure that financially, I had quite a bit of a runway.

Because, again, there’s no guarantee when you leave a paycheck kind of a situation, there’s no guarantee that any income will come in. So certainly now, thankfully, you know, I’ve always looked after my finances, financially savvy. And, again, when I first came and I went to college, I graduated with debt, right, because I wasn’t making enough money. I couldn’t even work like I wanted to, right?

But over the years, I it was for me okay. So here’s a personal tidbit about me. If I can afford something, I do. If I don’t, if I can’t, then I will not spend the money.

Right? So financially savvy and just managing my finances, it’s something that I’ve always been intentional about. I live a very comfortable lifestyle, but I was always preparing that. So after I left, during that chunk of time, I made sure that I was being extra cautious.

I made sure that, okay, if I want to make this sooner, I need to make sure that I enable myself so that, again, if I step away and there’s no guarantee of a paycheck, there is wrong way for me. But also thinking about what is it that I’m going to do? How will I help people? There’s a lot of things, and that’s another lesson we can talk about that even after I made a change.

Like you said, for a few years there, I was thinking about it, but even and I knew what I was going to do, but even after I left, Malcolm, so about a year ago, what I did not anticipate is that I needed to take even more thoughtful, focused time to think about exactly of all the things that I want to do. And I knew already, but narrow it down even more, what do I want to focus on? Am I going to take this on? Should I do this?

Should I not do this?

Because one of the things that I did not expect that happened once I made the pivot was that there was distractions.

There was people reaching out and say, Hey, can you work as a principal consultant for me? You can combine the technical with the business.

Hey, can you do this? Can we work in this capacity? And I had to think about it and say, Nope, that’s not part of my business model. That’s not something that I wanted to do.

This is what I want to do. But even there, I had to and it’s evolving, by the way. I’ve been learning to even how to articulate in a clear way to help people understand, here’s how I can help you, which matches what I’m passionate about or where I want to focus my energy and my passion on.

So that’s a really important message in terms of, you know, managing your time, prioritizing your time. What is your target market? Right? What is your mission, first of all?

Kind of what is the overall broader mission? You know, what how would you describe your mission? How would you describe the strategy needed to enable that mission? And if you are not aligned to that, then your time is precious.

Don’t do it. Else, you need to do it. But that’s so hard, though. I I can imagine there there’s always gonna be situations where it’s like, okay.

This may not be fully aligned, but I’m getting in front of a group of people, maybe, for example. Like, that’s that could be useful. You could argue to yourself that could be useful, or I’m getting some exposure that I wouldn’t have always got. So sticking to that, I imagine, was probably easier said than done.

It was sticking to it and it was also just refining for my own self. There was distractions. Some of them were easier. Now, there was something else that happened.

Maybe it would have gone through, maybe not. Right? But it just so happened the month that I gave my notice, it was pretty much the last couple of weeks when I was making the pivot that I had a couple of recruiters reaching out for some very prestigious jobs, right? Big titles, big companies.

And you think and it makes you stop and say, Okay, maybe it would have gone somewhere, maybe nowhere. I don’t know. But at that point, I had to have an internal conversation and say, Do I even give this a chance? I just said to myself and to my organization that I am pivoting out of corporate.

So, it had to, again, the distractions, and some of them are easier to say no to, others you think more about, and others you think even more about. Right? So, I had to think about that and I actually never pursued, and I said, Nope, I just figured it out, right? But then the other layer to this, when I left, it was mid June.

I remember it was mid June. I returned my laptop to my to strike it in my previous employer.

And then pretty much through July, August, I had a few, a couple of speaking engagements in there, a couple of trips, but a lot of what I did was really refining. I knew I wanted to work around data and AI to do speaking and advisory, and I can tell you why speaking and advisory was in my mind, that’s what I thought I wanted to do. Right? And I also knew that I wanted to help people with their careers, so I thought I will do a little course, my side project, as I called it at the time, to help people with their find clarity with their careers and accelerate their career growth with confidence, right? But then for a couple of months there, it’s almost as if it seemed as if I wasn’t productive, But really, that was the most important because I took quiet, focused time to hammer down how to articulate this and what exactly does this mean, what kind of services will I offer, Exactly who is my target customer, like you said? How will I reach out to them? And then some more tactical things.

Okay, I’m a business happy person. I know I have to have a brand. What’s my colors? What’s my logo? Do I have a tagline? How will people recognize this is, this is my business? What do I call my business?

And the funny thing is I had actually created the legal entity a couple of years earlier, but I never liked the name. It was the name that I wanted wasn’t available. So when I changed, I actually went through another change to really change the legal name and make it Dora B Global, which I did not end up with our name until about a couple of months after I pivoted.

Right? So, you have to also be open to the change that’s going to hit you, because you evolve as you go through it, you’ll learn things.

The biggest surprise, I had to spend more time that I did not anticipate to focus, to refine my focus, what’s my mission, who am I serving, how am I going to do this, And even more, how am I going to communicate about it? Because for my case, my situation personally, I just said data and AI, I’m very passionate. I was always thinking how can I drive impact in my organization? I want to do that for data leaders, data and AI leaders, and innovative organizations, usually small organizations.

But I also said I’m very passionate about helping people, and my track record shows now.

For ten years before I left corporate, I would speak at conferences, I do podcast, webinars.

I’d mentor. I’ve been a women in tech mentor for many, many years. Right?

And so I wanted to do that. But to people that don’t know me and also how to bring those two together, it could be that somebody said, well, Dora, what are you all about? Are you about helping people with their careers? Or are you about data and AI?

Are you good at any of this? Why are you so confused?

That was a very and I wasn’t confused. It was just a matter of how do I bring this together, because at the end of the day, it’s still me. I’m passionate about these things. I’ve done all of it, and I wanna continue doing it, but how do I communicate this in a way that does not give the wrong message?

Because if I don’t do a good job with that, then okay, I made the pivot, but I can’t do it by myself. I need to serve someone. I need to help someone, and that’s my mission. How do I help others rise and do better with their data, AI, strategy, and career? That’s what I’m passionate about. And if I cannot help others understand, this is what I’m here to help you with and here’s why I can help you and here’s how I can help you, this is why I’m the right person for you to work with, then I’m not gonna be able to do that.

I love the idea of helping others rise, right, and lifting others up. I think I think that perspective, that that mindset is working for others instead of working for yourself and being in service of others is is something I think more data and analytics leaders could embrace or should or should necessarily embrace. It’s something that Sol Rashidi mentions a lot in her book. And if there’s one thing that I would say that differentiates Sol, there’s a lot of things that differentiate Sol.

But one of them, and she talks about this often, is this idea of lifting others up and and being, you know, a force to help others advance instead of her. And in doing so, there’s a lovely irony there that I really, really love that when you do that, you advance. And that you grow and you advance and you will prosper, but you do it through this perspective of service. So I hear you say that. I I I I love that because there’s something there’s something there. Instead of this being about me and my career and my advancement and my money, this idea of service, I think, is is is an interesting one we should be thinking more about.

So, Malcolm, this is at the very core of my mission. My mission is exactly that. How do I help others? And by others, when we’re talking about the target audience, which are the people that I think I can help the most, are data and AI leaders, are people in data and tech, wherever they are in their careers, And are organizations like, you know, startup innovative smaller organizations, right? Because I bring the thirty years of business and technical expertise, I bring my passion for this, I bring my experience, my expertise, all of that, but also, it’s at the very core of who I am. Like I said, even when I was in corporate, I had global accountability type roles at the enterprise level.

Me speaking, mentoring, teaching, all of that, it’s almost as if I had, it’s almost as if I had a second job.

I was doing it out of love and passion to help others and to influence the industry.

So for me right now, at fifty three when I left, I’m fifty four now, to live a comfortable salary compensation package, to start from scratch, honestly, it’s not about the money.

And no matter how well I do, I’m not going to go from zero to what I was making right away. Right? It’s not about the money. It’s about I I look.

Of course, I need to make a living. Right? Because I need to make a living so that I can bring more of that passion and that help to others. Right?

So it is a business, and I need to think now. That’s another thing because we’re talking about people another aspect of it, and we can talk about what it is like to set up the business itself. Right? But it is about how do I help others rise in their careers.

The stage that I am in my career and my life, it’s all about, yes, that’s what makes me happy. So one of the things that I did last year, and it was about August, and it was about this time when I was thinking through and I said, I was thinking to myself, okay, I have to put this message out there a year ago.

And I said to myself, okay, what are my values? I’m building this organization, this business, Dora B Global.

What are my values? What matters to me? And I’ve actually did a lot of focus work. I ended up with something that I ended up spelling heart.

And it’s got things in there like high standards and empathy and results and tenacity, things like that. Right? So it’s all about how do I help others soar? Even the name of my program or the coaching side is soar with confidence because that’s what makes me happy right now.

I love it. Of titles. I’m not after a lot of money. I’m after help others. And exactly what you said, Malcolm, when you do that and it’s an honest service to others, it actually comes right back and helps.

You get the the universe rewards you.

Yeah. This is this is the benefit of age. Right? Like, when when I was young and ridiculously selfish and not thinking about those things, you know, you could hear an old timer like me say, hey. You know, pay it forward.

You know? Alright. Alright. This is all about me. But now looking back and through the wisdom of age here, I I I know what you just said to be true.

And it it’s it’s a message that I try to integrate into everything that I do day in and day out. Even something as simple as being on LinkedIn and and making a comment on LinkedIn. I I I am I consciously have an intention of trying to help others in the things that I say, and I think, hopefully hopefully, that that shines through. So, you know, you spent two years, three years kind of coming up with the plan.

You had a couple of months after you made the transition. You you have this idea of a let’s call it a business plan because that’s basically what what it is. You kind of kind of came up with the business plan.

And in making the transition, are there one or two things that really surprised you that you didn’t anticipate? You were like, Wow. Like in looking back now, man, I should have been thinking more about A or I should have been thinking more about B. Things that just kind of surprised you that were curve balls that were not part of the plan.

Paola Ruizmi (zero twenty:forty five): The biggest surprise was that I did not anticipate to spend as much time early on thinking because I thought I knew.

Okay? Another lesson, I call it that, is, again, to be open to evolve with it. Because things that I thought matter of as might need it, it’s really listening to your customer, listening to listening to the people that you wanna serve. What do they really want?

And then the third one, not a surprise, but really more reinforcing it, is doing a good job of helping others understand how you’re helping them. Other than that, other than that, I would say it’s just the whole, the tactical part of it. How do I set it up as a business? What is my backend?

So, things that I didn’t know I was going to learn that I learned along the way is, how do I keep track of it all?

How what are my basic business admin processes? Right? Okay. I want to enroll someone in my program.

How does that happen? How do I build it in a way that I can scale? I spent twenty of my thirty years of Spire doing enterprise architecture, data, business, solution, right? Thank goodness that helped now that you have to be an architect.

But if you’re not and you’re thinking about going, definitely surround yourself with people that have bring that that can bring that perspective because what helped me, it’s actually I did design before I did build, which is what I’ve been preaching as an architect all these years.

So even July, August, when I was thinking I wasn’t building, I knew I was building in just in different terms, a foundation. And then September, October, I came back from Greece because I spoke in Greece. We went up to New York and so forth. Right?

I came back and I did my research and I said, what is a technology platform now? Here’s what I want to do. Here’s the business capabilities that I need for my business to run as a business. Not me coaching or teaching or speaking, the back end, running the business.

I was clear as to here’s the capabilities that I want a technology platform to help me.

And I did the research, and I ended up making a decision, and then I got the technology platform, and then I implemented it.

Like those, before I built it, I took a month researching, but that was the best decision or the best action I did, because right now, it’s there and everything I need to do, I know it supports it, because I’ve done my pre work. And the other thing, it was obviously harder earlier on, manual processes, but I’ve made it my goal, which turned out to be the all the time I wanna spend with loved ones, I knew year one, I wouldn’t have it as much because you’re building a business. So the first year or building a business. So the first year or two, it’s really long days, long nights.

You make it as long or as short as you want to. Right? But for me, I would take the time to say, okay. What is this process?

I’ll make it repeatable and automate it, and that way I can scale. Because a year from now, six months from now, I want to be out there speaking. I want to be coaching people. I want to be speaking to people, helping them solve the problems.

I don’t want to be back here doing back office work. So I’ve created repeatable processes and I automate it, and I continue doing that as the business evolves. And that’s one of my rules. And I think it’s some people might say, hey, you could have built all this stuff a lot sooner.

But now I’m good with where I am because it allows me to scale now and be better at what I do, my mission, than otherwise.

All this stuff like, you know, billing, invoicing, time tracking, all of that stuff that probably a lot of people don’t really think about. But oh, just accounting, like QuickBooks. Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

So Like you’re thinking about leaving corporate, let’s say, to start something, I mean, that’s a big realization.

People sometimes forget about it because it can get very expensive otherwise.

Oh, yeah. Because then you start outsourcing, but it can get very expensive and you can and it can get expensive at a time where you don’t really have a lot of income coming in because you’re just starting up. Right?

Oh, yeah.

And there are things that you can do to help you, and you can always find that that right help.

Well, the I mean, I’ve even offered AI.

The good news is AI. For example, like, you know, my my wife’s got a small business. And, like, three years ago, we paid somebody, like, five grand to build a website.

And a couple of weeks ago, I just used Replit, like, to vibe code a website in twenty minutes.

Yes. Yeah. Now Definitely, technology is helping.

Yeah. Yeah. I’m not sure we wanna fully automate, like, our accountants and our lawyers just yet. I mean, talk about expensive. Those are two areas where things could get expensive in a hurry, accountants and lawyers.

But, yeah, that’s all that’s that’s all the things that go into into running a business.

I’m I’m I’m excited for you. I’m excited to see where things are going. In in our last couple of minutes, let’s talk about the state of data and AI. Let’s let’s talk about what you’re seeing out there.

You know, I’m seeing a lot of stuff around. It’s kind of driving me nuts a little bit because I I have a hard time reconciling what I see in the news versus what I see in reality.

But I’m seeing all these things about, like, AI failing, right, and AI pilots failing, and this failing, and fail fail. I just every time like, this morning, first thing I I I log on this morning, first thing I see is some survey from MIT saying ninety five percent of AI pilots fail.

And I’m having a hard time reconciling that with the fact that I know every single company that I talk to, their software engineering teams are using CoPilots, and they’re, like, twenty, thirty percent more productive.

HR teams are not writing job descriptions anymore. They’re not even manually reviewing most resumes anymore for better or worse.

Marketing teams, writing market like, what I see is this this major adoption of AI, but what I keep hearing is fail, fail, fail. What I mean, what what’s your reaction to that? What are you seeing out there?

I think it’s a mixed Malcolm. I think it really depends too maybe the size of the organization as well, maybe the industry, how tech it is, what it isn’t. Right? It’s interesting you ask me this because just last night, very impromptu, I was actually talking to ChargeGPT.

And all of a sudden, I started doing so I have not cross referenced this information that it gave me. It could have been bogus information, so I’ll take that with a grain of salt here. But I was actually having that exact I kept asking questions. I was curious.

And I was asking, Hey, how many of these AI, POC implementations are successful? What is the rate? And originally, what Chargebee T told me was thirty to forty percent. And then I said, Okay, but how do you know this?

What is the source? Turns out he found some report from McKinsey, I think, which turns out it was about seventeen percent.

That study said that about seventeen percent of the implementation of AI actually have a return on investment. And that return on investment, it’s about one to two percent. Again, I have not cross referenced, so this may be erroneous information, but it was just very recent last night I was having this, the beginnings of some research that I’m doing. Right?

So I think it’s a mix. I think sometimes people say they do more than they are, and I have personal examples on it. It’s anecdotal examples, but some examples that I know.

I think there are I mean, in terms of the enterprise really getting benefit from it, yes. There’s productivity. Right? I use it in my small business. There’s a lot of people using it, you know, even for bigger enterprise. Right? Summarizing emails, brainstorming ideas, right?

Crafting new emails, right? Things like that.

Now with other tools, getting the information from across different sources a lot quicker, Is it enough for a big return investment? I think we still have ways to go. I think there is a lot of talk. You’re asking about the state.

I know there is a lot of talk about agents or agenda workflows right now and where that is going. I think we don’t know what we don’t know. I think it’s going to change even more than before. We think we’re going through a lot of change.

I think the pace of change is going to be even more rapid as we go forward. So I don’t know that anyone knows the true answer to this. It really depends.

And, I don’t know that we’re always hearing the right information.

I’ll leave you with that one study, and I hope I remember the figures correctly, but there was another study that happened where IT practitioners overstated their understanding and uses of AI by seventy two percent, I wanna say, but IT leaders were overstating it by ninety percent.

So sometimes we do overstate for x y z reason.

That I have no doubt about.

Yeah. I have no doubt about that because there’s so much pressure to show movement on on AI, and I suspect there’s plenty who are saying, oh, yeah. We’re widely deployed, and it’s just, you know, people using their preferred LLM at the desktop, which is which is not nothing, right, which is greater than zero. I mean, just simply allowing people to use an LLM at the desktop.

Okay. There’s issues there. You know, disclaimers abound. Listeners, just don’t go turning off the shelf LLMs LLMs loose in your organization.

There’s things you need to do. You need to be running this on your own tenant and maintaining all of your data. But, yeah, the the overestimating or the over, you know, hyping, I suspect, that’s a very, very common thing. But to get back to the whole say go ahead.

Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Alright. To get back to the whole POC thing, I I part of it one of the reason why it drives me nuts a little bit is it is that I’ve had plenty of p POCs in my time never make it to production, and they were still highly successful.

Because we learned about what works. We learned about what didn’t work. We learned about bear traps to avoid. We learned about best UIs and best designs. We learned a ton that allowed us to go back and refactor, to go back and reengineer. So the the next time, it increased the likelihood of a success.

So this binary view of of, you know, either it’s in production or it’s not in production, and that’s the only meter of success of a POC, I I think it’s just completely wrong. I mean, POCs are there for us to learn from. Yeah. We want them to go to production because the costs go down, but success can still be learning instead of just going to production.

So I see you bring up such a such a critical point. Right? It’s like, how do you define success? And I think what’s really going to help us not only get better data around this, but the confidence to go up and everything is making sure that the things that we do before we go into POC, do we know what we’re solving for?

And is it really an AI? Is AI the right or generative AI or machine learning? Usually, people just jump into generative AI these days, but whatever the technology, is it the right technology? I think we’re starting with all these overestimated, you know, in, what’s the word, like too many expectations, and we’re thinking that we can just skip the fundamentals around data.

I mean, we’re both in data and, you know, you can’t just, I don’t care how good AI is. If you have a shaky foundation, it’s going to just give you shaky results at best, right, and a lot faster. I think I think the moment we start getting clarity as to what is it that we want to do this? Is this really the right technology?

And not just jump to using it and then it fails because, well, we’re measuring the wrong things and we’re having unrealistic expectations, and it’s not the right tool or resource to use for what we’re trying to solve. We skip, or we tend to want to skip over those stages in the whole one to one process of of building things. So I think when we do better in that in that stage, then AI is going to do better as well because we’re gonna use it for the right things, and we’re going to put the right people on the team because AI is not going to do it. It’s people along with AI.

It’s just a lot of technology.

You and I have been, in in tech for a while. Right? I think you and I spoke about this before. I started as a global mainframe programmer. I’ve done twenty years of VA. I’ve seen so many technologies over the years that were the hot thing.

Three two years ago, it was about generative AI. Then it became about agents. Then it became about agenda workflows. Then we’re going to talk about, I don’t know, physical AI, then we’re going to talk about something different. It keeps changing. So, realizing that there’s no magic bullet, and it’s not a black box, and we need to understand what we want to use it for and how we get that clarity as a team, and we use it really as the right tool, the right resource for what where it makes sense, and we still are accountable for what happens, and we don’t have all those over inflated expectations, then I think we’ll do better and we’ll be reporting better results about it too.

Well well, hey, COBOL. There’s still COBOL running on mainframes and banks to this day. There’s still some COBOL out there. There’s still some FORTRAN. Maybe some past channel things around out there.

And the people who know that, oh wee.

There’s money to be made as a COBOL programmer, believe it or not, out there. Anyway, this has been wonderful. Dora, thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing your journey here to to success as an individual practitioner.

Do you call yourself a consultant or a coach? Yeah. Advisor. Is that advisor?

I am I’m a speaker, coach, and advisor. So I speak on data. Yeah. Yeah. Not a consultant because I don’t typically go on the operational side of executing. It’s more on the strategic side. So advisor, not a speaker, advisor, and coach rather than a consultant.

Good. Where can people find you?

Definitely LinkedIn or, you know, if you just search Dora Busseas by my name, you’ll find me on the typical social media out there, dorabusseas dot com, my website. By LinkedIn, I’m active on there and people can reach out anytime really.

You you probably know this about me, Malcolm. Right? I’m always open. I always like to just I would say never stop learning, and we’ll learn better when we just keep on helping, supporting each other, and learning from each other. So I invite people to reach out and, have a conversation on LinkedIn.

Awesome. I hope people take advantage of that offer.

For anybody who’s still with us, I would be absolutely positively thrilled if you took a moment to subscribe or get notifications to this podcast, however you consume it, maybe that’s through YouTube, maybe that’s through Spotify, you name it. I would be honored if you took a moment to subscribe and to let us know that we’re doing some good things here at the CDO Matters podcast. And with that, thanks again, Dora.

We will see you on another episode of this podcast, hopefully in another two weeks. Talk to everybody soon. Bye for now.

Thank you, Malcolm.