Cindi Howson
About Cindi Howson
Cindi Howson serves as the Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot, where she influences product strategy and consults on business intelligence practices. With a background that includes leadership roles at Gartner and founding BI Scorecard, she is recognized as a leading figure in analytics and business intelligence.
Work at ThoughtSpot
Cindi Howson has served as the Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot since 2019. In this role, she influences the company's product strategy and consults with clients on business intelligence (BI) strategy, tool selection, and best practices. Her expertise in analytics and BI contributes to ThoughtSpot's initiatives in the data analytics space. She is based in Sparta, NJ.
Previous Experience at Gartner
Before joining ThoughtSpot, Cindi Howson worked at Gartner as a Vice President from 2015 to 2019. During her tenure, she led the analytics and BI Magic Quadrant, focusing on research areas such as data for good, natural language processing (NLP) in BI search, and augmented analytics. Her work at Gartner established her as a thought leader in the analytics and BI domains.
Education and Expertise
Cindi Howson holds an MBA from Rice Business - Jones Graduate School of Business, where she studied Management Information Systems (MIS) and Marketing from 1998 to 1999. She also earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Maryland between 1983 and 1987. Her educational background supports her extensive career in data strategy and analytics.
Achievements in Analytics and BI
Cindi Howson has been recognized as one of the top analytics and BI influencers by various organizations, including Onalytica and Analytics Insight. She was named Women in Data's Data Leader of the Year in 2021 and received the WLDA Motivator of the Year award in 2022. Additionally, she has authored several influential books on business intelligence, further establishing her authority in the field.
Podcast and Thought Leadership
Cindi Howson hosts The Data Chief podcast, which has received awards for its contributions to the analytics field. She has also served as a faculty member at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) for over a decade. Her role as a thought leader is evident through her contributions to industry publications and her advisory work with top clients on data strategy.