Andy Ruckley, chief data officer, Sea/

Describe your career to date

My career began nearly 30 ago as an analyst in a marketing department, where data about customer behaviour was used to tailor marketing messages and this gave me a real thirst to turn data into actionable insights. While working for a large mobile phone operator, I decided to study for a Master’s in Applied Statistics which, with the large data-sets available, allowed me to build many segmentations and predictive models.

This is where I first experienced the power that good insights can bring to effective decision making. I took this enthusiasm for data with me into my senior management roles, where my focus moved from customer strategy and CRM to enabling the whole business through business intelligence and data warehousing. I then focused on building strategies and approaches that delivered holistic data ecosystems that could support timely insights on an architecture of modern, flexible technologies.

During my time at ASOS, a key focus for me was the importance of bringing the right people together to provide the right blend of data architecture, data stewardship and data engineering skills to tie economic significance to the value of data.

I brought this learning into Photobox and took it a step further by embedding team members into the product teams to help champion data, showcasing how it can benefit the business and raise people’s understanding of how to use and interpret it, especially in improving the customers experience of a web journey.

Now at Sea/, I am enjoying bringing all of this together into the shipping industry, which is really starting to embrace data and actionable insight. To deliver on our purpose of “powering better decisions to enable sustainable shipping” we are looking to deliver relevant insights and intelligence in many areas to enable our customers to make efficient choices, whether that is predicting port congestion or optimising vessel selections for their given cargos while minimising carbon emissions.