Arvind Rajagopalan

Most organisations are data-rich but decision-poor. Despite significant investment in data platforms and analytics, many teams still rely on intuition, outdated reports, or fragmented views when making critical decisions. This panel brings together enterprise leaders to explore why data often fails to influence decisions in practice, and what needs to change across operating models, culture, and product design to close the gap between insight and action.

Shifting a decentralised, federated enterprise towards cohesive data platform practices is as much a cultural and organisational challenge as it is a technical one. To empower business domains without creating new data silos, organisations must balance global alignment with local autonomy. True transformation depends on trust. When data consumers trust the assets available to them, adoption grows; when they do not, teams revert to building isolated and redundant solutions. Drawing on leadership experience across dynamic customer channels and highly regulated industries, Sonja explores the realities of scaling data platforms, establishing trust, and driving data excellence across the organisation.

• Architecting federated governance frameworks that preserve local domain independence while enforcing global interoperability standards

• Designing for trust: utilizing data catalogues and structured information modelling to build an intuitive internal data marketplace

• Navigating the human side of scale: transforming privacy, risk, and regulatory compliance guardrails into proactive, automated platform enablers