Never let your job description dictate your work. Be willing to step up and find areas where you can start to take on greater responsibility even before you’re formally granted it through a promotion.

I recently did a Q&A with Doug Hague of Bank of America Merchant Services about his journey to becoming a CAO. As part of the same series, I wanted to share another with a well-respected industry expert to help anyone who is looking to end up in the C-Suite at this level eventually.

This week's guest contributor is Joe DeCosmo. As CAO of Enova International, Joe leads a multi-disciplinary analytics team that provides end-to-end data and analytic services including data warehousing, business intelligence, business analytics, fraud, credit risk and marketing. His team supports the global online financial services offered by Enova International and delivers on-demand decision-making technology and real-time predictive analytics services to clients through the Enova Decisions® brand. Before starting at Enova in 2014, he served as Director and Practice Leader of Advanced Analytics for Chicago-based West Monroe Partners. He has also held a number of executive positions at HAVI Global Solutions and the Allant Group. Joe received a B.A. in economics from Lewis University and an M.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is Immediate Past-President of the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association and is on the Advisory Board of the UIC College of Business Administration. Joe lives in the Chicago area with his wife and daughters.

Joe will also be speaking at the Chief Analytics Officer Europe this year, which will be held between the 25th and 26th of April.

Richard: Please could you detail your journey to becoming a Chief Analytics Officer?

Joe: As an economics graduate student, I started working at Argonne National Laboratories in their energy and environmental systems group conducting electric utility demand and emissions forecasting. After a few years, I moved into telecommunications and worked in business research, operations, forecasting and pricing at Ameritech. After that, I decided I wanted a change and took a turn into the marketing analytics world. I stayed there for almost 20 years at a few different firms, including running my own company, where I focused on providing predictive analytics for direct and multi-channel marketing programs. I ran that business for ten years and sold to The Allant Group where I joined their Executive team. After seven years with Allant, I joined West Monroe Partners as Director and Practice Leader of Advanced Analytics. Then, a few years ago, the CAO opportunity at Enova International opened up. To join a company right here in Chicago that was young, growing, and built on analytics and technology was an exciting opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.

Richard: Could you describe exactly what you are responsible for at the moment from a technical and headcount perspective?

Joe: I manage a 50-person multidisciplinary analytics team that supports the global online financial services offered by Enova International. The team provides end-to-end data and advanced analytic services including data warehousing, business intelligence, fraud, credit risk and marketing analytics. I’m also leading Enova’s first analytics-as-a-service offering, Enova Decisions, which is extending our real-time analytics and automated decisioning capabilities to companies across a variety of industries.

Richard: How important was your education in enabling you to get to where you are now?

Joe: I credit a lot of my career success to my graduate work at the University of Illinois—Chicago. During my time there, I studied econometric and time series analysis and the knowledge, experience, and friendships I gained have been critical to my career in the long run.

Richard: In the three years that you have held your position, how have you seen your role evolve as a Chief Analytics Officer?

Joe: Since I joined Enova, my role has grown quite a bit. We doubled the size of the team in my first eighteen months, moved the Data Services and BI teams from IT to Analytics, and organized our credit risk teams by country and product. We also invested heavily in building a new, real-time platform for all of our models, called Colossus. Every decision we make along the customer journey, from application through customer service, is driven by models that are built by our team and live on this real-time platform. Real-time analytics is truly embedded in our business and a core capability and competitive advantage. Building on this expertise, I launched a new business called Enova Decisions in January 2016 to offer our predictive analytics and real-time decisioning capabilities to other companies.

Richard: Over the course of the next few years, how do you see the role of a CAO changing?

Joe: The future of analytics and the CAO role is promising. My prediction is that virtually every business and industry will have an advanced and predictive analytics function. These analytics will be used to automate previously manual processes or decisions that deliver better customer experiences and operational results. More companies are realising that how they gather their data and use it for business decisions can be a competitive advantage, so I think we’ll see more C-level positions dedicated to just that.

In my consulting life, I found that very few companies had the ability to easily and quickly deploy analytics into production for the business. To address this, CAOs will, of course, play the critical roles of building their teams and putting the necessary technical infrastructure in place. They’ll also need to help their teams get business stakeholder buy-in for analytics to be used and integrated across functions, from marketing to human resources.

Richard: What advice would you give to more junior professionals or those a few years behind you if they would like to reach your level of responsibility and hold the title of CAO?

Joe: When you’re starting out, think about experience and skill development rather than compensation growth or title progression. After I had got out of graduate school, I changed jobs three times before starting my own business, and those moves were at most lateral changes with little or no movement in salary or title. But I was seeking out roles that added to my experience and skills, and I found that’s way more important than getting a fancy title or a big raise.

So, what skills do you need? Develop strong technical skills, build solid business acumen, and never overlook the importance of communication. Being good at communicating with non-technical counterparts in your organisation will be just as important to your career advancement as technical skills and business understanding.

Finally, never let your job description dictate your work. Be willing to step up and find areas where you can start to take on greater responsibility even before you’re formally granted it through a promotion.

By Richard Downes:

Richard Downes specialises in helping companies hire experienced Analytics, Data Science, Machine Learning and NLP professionals in Europe and the U.S and have over 15 years of Recruitment / Staffing experience.

Save

Save