Director, Business Engagement & Data Strategy

Position Title: Director, Business Engagement & Data Strategy

Location: Virginia

Your role 

Digital Realty is seeking a Director of Business Engagement & Data Strategy to lead enterprise-wide alignment between business functions and the Chief Data Office (CDO). This leader will ensure that the company’s critical data assets—spanning customer, product, vendor, and employee domains—are strategically governed, unified, and optimized for use in analytics, AI, and digital transformation initiatives. As the strategic front door to the CDO Program, this role serves as the connective tissue between business objectives and enterprise data enablement. The Director will partner with business and technology leaders to surface data-driven opportunities, define use cases, and drive adoption of enterprise data standards. Through this work, they will ensure that Digital Realty’s data ecosystem delivers trusted insights, accelerates innovation, and positions the company for intelligent, AI-ready operations.

What you’ll do Insert 5-10 bullet points to highlight the responsibilities of the role. 

Strategic Leadership & Business Partnership

· Act as the enterprise liaison between business units and the CDO, ensuring that business priorities are translated into actionable data, analytics, and AI use cases.

· Lead the Business Engagement & Data Strategy pillar, driving alignment between business strategy, data governance, and digital transformation initiatives.

· Shape and maintain the enterprise data and analytics strategy, collaborating with governance, architecture, and AI/ML teams to ensure data assets are clean, trusted, and reusable.

· Champion data as a business enabler — promoting its role in powering analytics, predictive modeling, and generative AI capabilities across the organization.

· Partner with business and technology stakeholders to identify and prioritize MDM and analytics use cases that drive measurable business value.

· Define success metrics, ROI frameworks, and business value realization models for data, analytics, and AI initiatives.

· Coordinate cross-functional delivery of critical data domains, ensuring traceability from business requirement to data output to insight.

· Support the development and operationalization of canonical data models (CDM) to unify definitions and enable interoperability for analytics and AI workloads.

· Advocate for the use of trusted master data as the foundation for business intelligence, predictive analytics, and machine learning models.

Program Collaboration & Thought Leadership

· Collaborate with Program Management, Information Architecture, Integration, and AI/Analytics teams to ensure cohesive execution of the enterprise data strategy.

· Provide strategic guidance on technology platforms, partnerships, and tools related to MDM, analytics, and AI enablement.

· Stay at the forefront of industry trends in master data, governance, and applied AI — incorporating best practices into the CDO MDM Program roadmap.

· Represent Digital Realty as a thought leader in data-driven transformation, advocating for innovation built on trusted, governed, and AI-ready data.

What you’ll need 

12+ years of experience in enterprise data management, analytics strategy, or business engagement functions.

· Proven experience leading or partnering in large-scale MDM, analytics, or data governance programs.

· Deep understanding of business processes, data stewardship, and AI/ML data requirements.

· Demonstrated success aligning business and technology stakeholders to deliver enterprise data and analytics capabilities.

· Exceptional communication and leadership skills with the ability to influence at executive and operational levels.

· Ability to connect the dots between data strategy and tangible business outcomes, especially in analytics and AI contexts.

Preferred Skills

· Hands-on experience with MDM and data governance tools (e.g., Profisee, Informatica, Reltio, Collibra) and analytics platforms (e.g., Power BI, Snowflake, Databricks).

· Familiarity with canonical data modeling, data integration, and cloud-based data architectures.

· Strong understanding of AI and ML model data pipelines, including data readiness, lineage, and bias mitigation.

· Program management or change management certification (PMP, Prosci, or equivalent).

· Experience shaping enterprise data strategies in global, complex organizations.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Analytics, or related field required. Master’s degree preferred.