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How Novanta’s CIO mobilized its data-driven transformation

Sarah Betadam, CIO of photonics, vision, and precision motion technology supplier Novanta, describes the need and process of going from zero company-wide reporting capability to a fully functional data-driven enterprise.

With headquarters in Boston and over 2,700 employees worldwide, Novanta is an $800 million global supplier of laser photonics, precision motion control, and vision technologies. CIO Sarah Betadam, who joined in 2019 as VP of business applications, and then became global CIO in January 2021, is tasked with the strategic direction, leadership, and implementation of the company’s digital transformation, juggling several initiatives simultaneously, many of which surround efforts to become a fully functional data-driven enterprise.

“My team and I are very proud of our transformation that started in 2019,” she says. “When I joined, there was a lot of silo data everywhere throughout the organization, and everyone was doing their own reporting. So in monthly or quarterly combined meetings, there weren’t apples to apples being compared. It was also a lot of churning for the different groups to come up with those data on the weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.”

So from the business side, there was a lot of inefficiency getting data to the point where it was presentable to different audiences, which presented in its own right a big business problem for Betadam. But where to begin?

“We started from a focused business case by partnering with three different groups to showcase how centralization of data can be efficient, helpful, and a good roadmap for the company,” she says. “You have to build trust within stakeholders, and really prove you can help them help themselves. That's the first level of a cultural shift. It took us about six months to do the proof of concept for three different business units, but it was highly successful. In fact, the ROI was so high, we gained the trust of our executives to invest in a platform to begin centralizing data.”

CIO contributing editor Julia King recently spoke with Betadam about Novanta’s unified shift from its fractured reporting culture to a more efficient data-driven organization. Here are some edited excerpts of that conversation. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On investing in capabilities: We've set up something called a BI Center of Excellence where we train and have workshops and seminars on a monthly basis that team members across Novanta can join to learn about how they could leverage data marts or data sources to build their own reporting. So we have a visualization layer where we teach different groups within our organization to learn. It’s evolved from over the past four years from having nothing and siloed data sets of spreadsheets and everyone doing their own thing, to being centralized based on KPIs and the trust in what they receive from the data. They're learning how to visualize data on their own, so they don't really need IT other than the data marts in order to build their own dashboards.