Show Notes
Welcome to the first episode of This Is Definitely Not a Data Podcast, where Brendan Ellis sits down with co-host Lenno, a Chief Data Officer with 25 years of experience, to tackle the conversations that usually happen behind closed doors.
In this debut episode, they dig into why the data world keeps repeating the same mistakes decade after decade, and why the arrival of AI hasn't changed that as much as people think.
From dashboards nobody uses to AI projects launched before anyone's asked the right questions, Brendan and Lenno make the case that technology isn't the problem...people are.
They explore the growing tension between Gen Z entering a workplace they don't fully understand, and leaders who've stopped asking why in favour of getting answers faster. Is AI making us more curious, or quietly making us lazier thinkers?
Warm, candid, and refreshingly honest, this is the conversation the conference stage never quite gets to.
More from This Is Not A Data Podcast
This week, Bren and Lenno ask whether data leaders need to be in the code, or whether the job is something else entirely. Lenno shares why vibe-coded output makes him want to understand code well enough to check it, and why a team of five pulls him closer to the detail than a team of 140 ever did. Bren, an accountant by trade, admits he's never written code and has always wondered when he'd be found out. They land on the harder question. If specialist work and leading people are different muscles, why do so many companies still treat management as the only way up? Their answer keeps coming back to trust, and whether your team picks up the phone when things go wrong.
This week, Bren and Lenno, ask what happens when we rename things that already had an established name. Yes, here's looking at you "super intelligence"... Lenno tells the story of how a team renaming an SAP table in plain business terms made data easier to read and harder to build on. Whilst Bren recalls a business that had seven names for the same report. The bigger question starts with governance and both discussion how agrees what the words mean and how much of it does a business actually need? Their answer keeps coming back to one word.
This week Bren is joined by guest Jamie Fry as Lenno is enjoying some well-earned time off. Jamie runs the Hawkfry Group, a consortium of senior cloud and data specialists, as the conversation dives into the real returns made on using AI. Jamie puts a real number on it and explains where his teams lean on AI the most. But the real question is where does the human still have the biggest impact? The discussion looks at the conundrum faced by AI speeding up the technical work but the human work being a bottleneck. And what should companies do to get started with AI? It's a cracker as we learn the revenue uplift this year for the Hawkfry group from AI and why Jamie has taken more holidays now than the previous 3 years. Hawkfry Group: https://hawkfry.com/ Jamie Fry Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fryjamie/
This week, Bren and Lenno are still reminiscing about the CXO Data Summit in Crete, but they dive straight into a question that follows them into every boardroom...what does "data first," "AI first," or "cloud first" actually mean?
This week, Bren and Lenno are joined by Peter Laflin, a chief data officer who's spent the summer researching what it takes for neurodivergent leaders to thrive in data and AI teams.