Blog.

By Jason Foster, host of the Hub & Spoken podcast, and CEO & Founder of Cynozure.

It has now been a year since the first ever episode of the Hub & Spoken podcast was released; a whole year of sharing the love of data and the stories it has to tell (Happy Valentine’s Day by the way)!

Thank you

The first thing to do is to thank all of the fantastic guests that we’ve had – it’s been an absolute pleasure to have such interesting, informative and in-depth conversations, and also massive thanks to everyone that has tuned in to listen (extra thanks to those that gave us star ratings 😉).

This milestone has got me reflecting on why we started the podcast in the first place; how it has evolved; what’s gone well/not so well, and how it has worked in conjunction with some of the other things we do here at Cynozure. It feels pretty special to have created a relaxed informal environment to discuss our craft, and one that has so many listeners.

What’s going well?

One of the things that has been really great is to be able to share some of the amazing work of some of our customers and friends, including members of the CDO Hub. A couple of examples of this include Phil Day at the Really Useful Group where some early advisory and strategy work has really developed (- we’ve loved growing the relationship and becoming a key part of musical theatre and the arts), and Johanna Hutchinson at The Pensions Regulator, who shares great insight on building a data team.

Earlier episodes had a definite slant on what it means to be a CDO and Data Leader, such as Barry Green (who will in fact be the keynote speaker at the next CDO Hub event) discussing the priorities of the CDO. This has progressed into pushing the agenda forward in other areas that we are passionate about, things like ethics, being human-centred, building better relationships, sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and how data can be used for good here.

Unsurprisingly some specific hot topics such as AI, soft skills and chatbots have made for interesting conversations too.

And not so well…?!

But of course, there has been plenty of learning along with the way too. The plan to put out two episodes a month, having never done a podcast in the past, may have been a bit too ambitious at the outset. And the idea of me, James Lupton and Tor Park discussing data related news stories wasn’t as interesting in reality as we thought it sounded! The idea to not share the stories we’d discuss with each other in advance of recording in hindsight wasn’t our best…ah well, it’s freed up air time for episodes with some top notch experts, which is is of course the name of game.

To go back to our overarching goal for the Hub & Spoken podcast: This is the platform for business and data leaders interested organisational growth through the use of data and analytics, how you create value, and what considerations there are in order to get things right.

Not forgetting

And finally, couldn’t miss a shout out to Pete Williams, who, in addition to being on the first ever episode, was the one to come up with the name: Hub & Spoken. Cheers Pete!

We hope you enjoy listening. Thank you.

In addition to listening to here, you can also find Hub & Spoken in all the usual places:

iTunes

Stitcher

Spotify

iHeart

TuneIn