Bio

Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot, host of The Data Chief podcast, and Women in Data's Data Leader of the Year 2021. Business intelligence, data and analytics expert with 20+ years' experience. Cindi joined ThoughtSpot in 2019 as Chief Data Strategy Officer. From 2015 to 2019, Cindi served as Vice President in Data and Analytics at Gartner. She led the analytics and BI Magic Quadrant, with research in data for good, NLP/BI Search, and augmented analytics. Prior to this, she was founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth in-depth product reviews based on exclusive hands-on testing, contributor to Information Week, and the author of several books including: Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data and SAP BusinessObjectsBI 4.0: The Complete Reference. She was a The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) faculty member for more than decade. She consults with customers on BI strategy, tool selection, and best practices. Prior to founding BI Scorecard, Howson was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for a Fortune 500 company. She has an MBA from Rice University. Cindi serves on the board for Rutgers University Big Data Certificate program ( http://bigdata.rutgers.edu/). She has been recognized as one of the top analytics and BI influencers by Onalytica, Simplilearn, Solutions Review, Analytics Insight and others industry watchers. Specialties: bringing data and technology to bear on a problem, right analytics tool for right use case, culture, AI ethics, data for good, women in tech.