Data In The Boardroom with James Blagg

In this episode of the Databricks Diaries, Daniel is joined by James Blagg, a seasoned Chief Data Officer with over 25 years of experience leading data strategy, architecture, and modernisation programmes across financial services.James shares hard-won lessons from a career that spans the 2008 financial crisis, the big data hype cycle, the move from Teradata appliances to cloud-native platforms, and now the AI wave. It's a candid conversation about what actually drives value in data — and the gap between vendor promises and operational reality.What's covered:James's career journey from Oracle PL/SQL developer to CDOLeading BI teams at Lloyds through the financial crisis and the HBOS integrationNationwide's data simplification programme and the "almost cloud" Teradata investmentHow platform evaluation has changed — and why cost, skills, and relationships now matter more than featuresWhy "it's on the roadmap" is the most dangerous phrase in vendor selectionThe MVP hypothesis approach to picking analytics use casesWhy so many data warehouse projects are perceived as failures (and why metadata investment is finally fixing it)Where AI really sits on the maturity curve — and why financial services is 10–15 years away from full back-office adoptionA practical playbook for governance, cost monitoring, and security guardrails before scaling AI on DatabricksThe truth about cloud consumption pricing and reserved pricing deals