On March 5th, we had our first Women in Big Data event in Barcelona that kicked-off the Barcelona chapter. We held this event at the Barcelona Cisco Co-Innovation Centre. We were really excited to start this chapter in our lovely city and also have Nahia Orduña, WiBD Munich chapter lead, joining us on this first event sharing her experience and knowledge about the organization.

We kicked-off the event having Nahia Orduña, Anna Closas and Núria Jordi introduce Women in Big Data, the mission, and what we would like to achieve. We also asked the audience whether other attendees would like to join Núria and Anna as part of the core team—we are four people already!

Our first speaker was Maria de Olano, Strategic Innovation Executive in the Office of Innovation at Salesforce. Maria joined Salesforce four years ago. As a strategist, she helps companies gain deep understanding of challenges, opportunities and roadmaps to create new value. She works with the customer to build an overarching vision harnessing business insights, human perspective and technology, articulate value for the company and its customers, align stakeholders to create momentum and identify key digital capabilities to support an actionable strategy.

Her topic was the “Customer Centric Approach: Digital transformation of the Organizations”. Digital transformation is an important topic for all organizations and Maria shared with us how important it is to change the mindset in the organization. Most CEOs look at their business and see two ways of change: 1) renovate: change their existing business to drive down costs and increase productivity, or 2) transcend: experiment with new ways of generating customer value as if they were a startup entrepreneur. What most companies do not realize that there is a third way that consists of evolving your company to be customer-centric: moving from a renovate to an evolve mindset. How can they get started? By following the four disciplines. The first involves designing a customer-centric business process, continuing to optimize your business processes but also looking at how these activities can be enhanced from the customer’s perspective. The second is centered on building one team around the customer. Why? Because everybody owns customer centricity, hence collaboration needs to be the top priority. The only way to make real change happen is connect silos and act as a unified team. The third discipline is to move to the leanest possible technology stack by having IT as a business partner driving innovation. The fourth discipline is to sense and respond by creating a data flywheel that fuels customer success. The best way is earning data that will help you analyze what you have and turn that data into insights, which become the DNA of improved experiences and in turn earn you more data that keeps the flywheel spinning.

The next item in the agenda was a panel with four panelists: Anna Closas, Núria Jordi, Nahia Orduña and Maria de Olano. Anna Closas has worked as Account Executive at Salesforce for the last two and a half years  She works with companies to help them lead the digital transformation through SaaS sales, and she has experience as a co-founder of a data driven startup, Citibeats. Núria Jordi, Systems Engineer Manager at Cisco, has worked in different roles for the past 14 years in Cisco and currently leads the Pre-Sales Systems Engineer for Global Virtual Sales in South Europe, UKI, RCIS, Eastern Europe, Switzerland and Service Provider. Nahia Orduña is Senior Manager in Analytics and Digital Integration at Vodafone. Her team is empowering digital strategy by accelerating quality decision-making based on facts and insights.

We discussed multiple questions brought by the attendees, including how important GPDR compliance is in companies and how this may affect their data strategy. They also asked about the role of data scientist in the organizations; the panelists and attendees shared their own experiences as data analysts in different markets, discussing the insights provided by those in their organizations.

We finished the event with pastries, coffee, juice, and most importantly, a really nice chat with all the attendees, where they were able to interact and get to know each other. We have already come up with new ideas and new people joining the core team, and we’re thinking ahead to our next events, where we will continue building the Women in Big Data Barcelona chapter. Thanks to all for joining us at Cisco on this first event!