“I hadn’t thought about my career as a lifetime until now, but when I look back, it has been a real lifetime in data terms.” That was Helen Crooks reaction when accepting this award, a response that reveals two things. Firstly, she is modest about her achievements. Secondly, she started when data was still viewed as a small subset of IT and has been at the centre of developments over the last 30 years.
Her early career working at Oracle from 1985 led to her being introduced to Edwina Dunn and Clive Humby in 1992 when they were starting dunnhumby from their kitchen table. Her job was to build out the data infrastructure that two years later would support the launch of Tesco’s Clubcard.
After running her own consultancy, she was approached by Virgin Media in 2006 as that brand was being created from a set of recently-merged organisation. There she set up the single customer view and strategic data architecture, before Tesco called her back in 2013 to be its group customer data director following its acquisition of dunnhumby.
The role of chief data officer at Lloyd’s of London followed in 2015 as it started on a digital transformation of the insurance sector. Most recently, she was CDO at Ofgem until 2022, helping to define data policy for the energy sector, before embarking on her current portfolio career as an advisor and non-executive director.
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