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

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.

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.

This is the takeaway episode with Bethany Sehon, Enterprise Data Leader at Capital One where she share lessons learned of building data products and ontologies in production long before they became buzzwords: dedicated data product managers (not side-of-desk), ontologists treated as first-class citizens, a VP-accountable governance process, and much more.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the start of our 7th year of doing the podcast. Juan and Tim kick off the 12th season sharing who are the upcoming guests and what's the latest on their mind about this crazy data and AI world:
The new website (honestnobsdata.com) and discussed building a knowledge graph of the podcast itself
Two types of semantics: for AI context vs. for system interoperability
The vendor hype gap vs. practitioner reality
AI agent proliferation and the governance surface area explosion
AI cybersecurity: models escaping their sandboxes
The economics of AI: accuracy, latency, and token cost as the new CAP theorem
The great convergence, "triangle of consolidation" and “postmodern data stack”
OSI and Apache Nessie
Work as the center of gravity
Bridging the operational and analytics worlds
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.