Carlos Guinea to present DIA’s People Analytics Case History at Data Management Summit 2020

Carlos Guinea to present DIA’s People Analytics Case History at Data Management Summit 2020

We continue to unveil day after day all those professionals who will participate with their papers in the most important event of Data Management. For the first time, a forum tries to focus on Data Management as a whole, from governance, through security, cloud, machine learning, data virtualization and much more. Today we present Carlos Guinea, Head of Innovation at Dia Supermarket

Tell us a little bit about your professional career

My career began in strategic consulting in the retail sector. After a couple of years performing repositioning projects in one of the most important Food & Beverage strategic consulting firms worldwide, I embarked on the adventure of moving to China to open the firm’s offices in the Asia Pacific region. 

During 4 years I had the opportunity to establish and manage offices in China, Hong Kong, and Macao to serve large accounts in the restaurant sector (mostly American chains) to be implemented in the Asian market through acquisition models and market penetration.

On my return to Spain, I embarked on a very attractive project with the creation of a new internal innovation area, for the fashion retailer Tendam (former Cortefiel group), and it is there that I began to develop my passion for innovation “New solutions applied to business challenges” and make it my profession.

The next project is Grupo DIA, where in the last 3 years I have had the opportunity to build the Innovation area, in which we focus mainly on exploring, testing and validating new solutions, startups, and technologies that help us to enhance and transform the different businesses of the group.

Innovation, like the other pillars of the transformation of companies, has the DATO as the main working tool, to know if we are doing things right or wrong and to teach us how to improve them.

What are your challenges, what do you like to do with the data?

The biggest challenge in the Innovation area is to make sure that we do not overlook any new emerging solutions in the digital world. That is why we are able to evaluate more than 100 Solutions/Startups per year and we are working to increase this ratio.

The data is our eyes. When you work with high uncertainty technologies or solutions (basically you don’t know if they will work) it is very important to agree on the measurement metrics and be faithful to them. In short, in the world of innovation and the startup ecosystem, it is easy to fall in love with ideas that pass in front of you, but only metrics and data will give us the reason to validate that a solution makes sense for the business.

Do you think companies have the right culture to manage data differently?

I think we are reaching that maturity in the last few years. The data has always been there, but now it’s being used in a different way. Little by little, we are learning that there are business Insights that we cannot observe with the naked eye and that it is essential to rely on new AI, advanced analytics, and ML technologies to discover the hidden face of the Iceberg.

Moreover, little by little, the direct application of these discoveries is encouraging us to continue adopting this Data-Driven culture.

What are the most important challenges for CIOs, CDOs, CTOs in 2021?

• Maintain the strategic and business vision above all else.
• Properly manage and delegate the more traditional functions of the role to focus on the more transformational ones
• To be in constant learning to be able to adapt to the changing ecosystem in which our clients and collaborators already live.

What do you want to talk about inside the Data Management Summit?

We come to talk about a case of People Analytics that has been quite recognized due to its innovative approach and its courage to try to solve a deeply rooted cultural challenge: Transforming the way teams work.

SmarTeams (the name of the project), is able to make every employee improve in 3 axes:

The way we communicate: Reducing the massive amount of emails we manage every day.

The way we meet: Making meetings more efficient

The way of sharing: Increasing the collaboration of tools such as the Google Suite.

To this end, we have created a tool that uses Data and Gamification, so that employees accept the challenge of improving their indicators in comparison with themselves and their colleagues and with colleagues in other departments.

It’s a bit like the health, running or cycling applications. Putting the data in the hands of those who can drive them (in this case the employees) so that they improve day after day.

A special thanks to our Google partner, Intelligence Partner for having believed in the project from the beginning and having designed and developed it brilliantly.

We hope you like it.

From the beginning, you have supported the event. Why?

The Data Management Summit is one of the essential events in the calendar every year. The quality of the attendees and the contents are always at a very high level. For Grupo DIA it is a pleasure to participate in this edition by sharing and learning from the rest of the participants. Therefore we thank you again for the invitation and hope to continue attending in future editions

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