Erin Leuschke
Senior Director, Enterprise Data & Analytics
Patterson Companies
Erin Leuschke is the Sr. Director Enterprise Data & Analytics at Patterson Companies. She has been a data & analytics leader across healthcare, distribution and airline domain. As a builder of data & analytics teams, she most recently aligned fragmented master data, data quality, data engineering, business intelligence and analytics teams at a F500 company into an enterprise data & analytics organization.
Erin is a former accountant with strong financial acumen. She also uses that financial acumen and organizational skills in her "other job" managing her kids lives, as well as being the manager for her middle son's hockey team and treasurer for her older son's boy scout troop.
Learn more about the Minneapolis CDAO community here.
Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.
I graduated with an accounting degree, and my first first job was in finance at a local airline. I had the opportunity to design a profitability model with an IT co-worker and realized the value of data. I then organized it as tools for other people to gain insights and discovered one of my skill sets – translating data to business terms and insights. I shifted from financial work to more budgeting and planning, including developing in planning systems like TM1. Then I had the opportunity to expand from TM1 to all financial systems including the implementation of SAP and showcase the value of all data, including financial data, as I led the implementation of business intelligence tools.
What is one of your guiding leadership principles?
I have a fortune cookie taped to my laptop – "People rise to your expectations."
What is the greatest challenge CDAOs face today, and how are you addressing it?
Data Skills. We’re training internally and finding externally, with the right mix of industry understanding and data skills.
What is the key to success for someone just starting out as a CDAO?
Elevator speech – Have a quick, memorable explanation of where you are taking D&A that the C-suite can remember and share with their teams. As well as know your top 3 priorities with reasons to defend why you can't keep focusing on fire drills. Your role is a lot of marketing.
How do you measure success as a leader?
It’s a sense of accomplishment from my team members and business partners – pride in their work and deliverables.
What is the value of being a member of Gartner C-level Communities?
The community provides a sense of belonging with peers. The higher you get in leadership in an organization the smaller your peer group becomes, and it's nice to have peers with similar experiences to collaborate with and bounce ideas off of.
Gartner C-level Communities Governing Body members share their insights and leadership perspectives to shape the agendas and topics that address the top priorities impacting business leaders today.
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