How has your career to date helped shape the job you do at ITV?

I started off in management and strategy consulting, spending time in America and Asia Pacific in consulting firms. In these roles, you learn to shift contexts across industries, spot patterns that cross over and take a more holistic approach to creating growth opportunities.

I then moved into entrepreneurship, start-ups, and scale-ups. Working in scrappy, funded start-ups and scale-ups really helped me broaden my expertise. Leading highly diverse, cross-functional teams, there’s no playbook to follow, so you learn to assimilate information quickly and evolve your approach to what you are seeing in the market. You become "delusionally optimistic" about the future and how you can create growth opportunities.

I then made the move client side. My experience in consulting and scale-ups helped tremendously, but perhaps the biggest learning from this phase is the value of executive and board storytelling to help create consensus and take people on the journey.

The industry often talks about digital literacy, but I think it’s far more important that transformational professionals hone their business literacy and are able to communicate and operate with the executive committee and boards. After all, securing funding is one thing, carefully sequencing and managing expectations is another - a skill definitely needed to successfully pull off a transformation.

The role at ITV is integrated into our ‘More Than TV’ strategy and we are developing solutions that directly tie to our corporate objectives and targets. We are constantly looking at how data can play its part around increasing monthly active users, viewing hours and digital revenue, in order to achieve our broader business goals.

How do you measure success from your technology investments?

We took a value-driven approach to our transformation strategy as this helped focus the mind on the "last mile" in the business in terms of actual delivery and value realisation. This has also helped then measure how much of the value mapped is actually realised from the transformation. Beyond the hard metric, we track some of the softer benefits such as "time to business value". A great example of this is the work we undertook in marketing where we shifted a core capability from 3 months to 3 minutes! I think the main point here is that it's more than a technology investment, it's a people and cultural investment that produces real results.

What are some of the initiatives you are looking at to nurture skills and data literacy?

We have set up a company-wide programme that is looking at upskilling - we tend not to use the language of literacy as it inevitably implies colleagues are illiterate! - so we opted for language that was around growth and development. We partnered with our talent development team to first map role personas and then developed tailored, bite-size training that would focus on a business problem.

On the wider talent strategy, we have established an active graduate programme as well as an apprenticeship scheme that runs across the organisation and allows us to bring in a diverse range of people to fit the roles of the future.

How can organisations shift the narrative - and culture - around data from cost creator to value creator?

Our approach at ITV has been around value cases (versus use cases) which works hand in glove with what the business is trying to achieve. We introduced and showcased the ‘art of the possible’ to help the business re-imagine ways of working. This helped create a compelling future vision that galvanised the organisation to action. With a value-based approach, a pull was created from the business including upskilling of non-data leaders, and a commitment to realise value.

We are three years into our Data Mesh journey, and this has been another key enabler as it places capabilities from people and technology into the business in a decentralised way.

What can organisations learn from ITV as they aim to prepare themselves for the next realm of digital and AI?

By decentralising the way we recruit we have helped the business better integrate new people and tech, so we now have data scientists, data engineers and ML Ops properly embedded, as part of the wider business team - and this is when the real magic happens. We fully embraced and led the way on "data as a product" which means we take value cases and use a product mindset to create the necessary foundation for an AI future. It's all about getting your data AI-ready.

Sanjeevan Bala, Group Chief Data & AI Officer, ITV will be taking part in a panel discussion on the Main Stage at DTX Europe on 4th October at 11.00-11.45, titled Twist and shout: How to change the narrative around digital from cost-centre to value-creator. Bala will be joined by Sameena Ali-Khan, Presenter, ITV News, Brigadier Stefan Crossfield, Head Information Exploitation & Chief Data Officer, British Army, Sophie Neary, Group Director, UK&I, Meta and Warren Tucker, Partner, Cloud & Digital Lead, PwC.

The panellists will explore how technology is changing the competitive landscape for organisations today, discussing whether value stream mapping is the key to measuring impact from your technology investments, and considering how leaders can divide their time between creating new services and innovation versus optimisation to manage tech debt.

With one week to go, there is still time to register to hear from senior IT leaders at organisations including Natwest, Marks and Spencer, Experian, AstraZeneca, DreamWorks Animation, TikTok and the Ministry of Justice. Just click here.

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