Your Burning Platform has Disintegrated: Data & the Aviation Crisis

Althea has a heart for adventure! She traded in her comfortable home; The Netherlands after 30 years to live and work in the United Arab Emirates; the innovative hub of the Middle East also known as a leading GCC Countries. As a 5 time Chief Data Officer, she is no stranger to adversity and turbulence in the corporate arena yet there was another ” level of dante’s hell” to address when she arrived in Abu Dhabi, just two months before the Covid Pandemic in a new sector; Aviation. Althea knows like no other the game to get attention for data and the effort to solicit attention from business leadership and management to take professional action. The business pre-Covid didn’t not see or wanted to ignore the burning platform available to them to step up the data game. The Covid pandemic is the mother of invention and a whole new level of Dante’s hell, Althea, because organizations are confronted with data sins of the past and the stakes get higher while you are drowning. Her insights and stories about data in high turbulence calls on applied wisdom for adoptive data strategies, for management of shrinking skeleton teams, for cultivation of data community of practices, for holding the attention of a distracted business customer and viding for attention of line management on data monetization. She also shares her reflection of the position of data after Covid in the UAE; the only country with a Ministry of AI reflecting the government’s commitment to innovative Vision 2021 and 2030 plans which beg for an abundance of data and an even higher level of data finesse and leadership. She’ll give us a final wrap up reflecting on the good, the bad and the ugly of the new data challenges and opportunities in this fascinating country.