Chris Miller, chief data officer, Royal London Group
Describe your career to date
It is a privilege to be the first CDO for Royal London; every week provides variety, growth, and challenge. Having moved into this role in 2021, I spent last year establishing a new data organisation within the group, focusing on building capability and earning a mandate to deliver change.
As I transitioned into the role, I was able to draw on relationships and perspectives from my previous duties at Royal London, including as group chief audit officer, a position I held for five years.
The audit role gave me a holistic view of, and deep insight into, our business. It involved working closely with the board and executive teams, having a view on all strategic and commercial matters, sharpening my influencing and diplomacy skills, while building trusted relationships with colleagues and external stakeholders, such as regulators. These lateral perspectives have been massively helpful going through a leadership transition into the CDO role.
Prior to joining Royal London, I worked in professional services at Deloitte. I joined there as a computing science graduate, before qualifying as a chartered accountant, and working on technology risk and audit client engagements for close to ten years. The variety of clients, international experience and different projects was a steep but enriching learning curve.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
As a modern mutual, we run the organisation in the interests of our customers and members, who ultimately benefit from the power of our mutuality. Our business strategy reflects the importance of data in helping customers achieve good outcomes in this context, through a data-led, digitally nimble approach. With the effective data culture set, we’re now working through a multi-year roadmap to enhance how we use data across our business.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
Our data organisation is a part of our group commercial division. Being positioned here has brought strong business alignment and ownership of the data-agenda. It also helps us to coordinate business demands around data before they reach our technology teams, who we collaborate closely with day to day.
Our data office has a broad remit and works across most areas of the data eco-system and we are custodians of the group’s data strategy. Our team provides data science, data visualisation and data engineering skillsets to build insight and machine learning products. Our data transformation teams are embedded into portfolio projects, providing data architecture, data design and data modelling services.
We also act as the hub for data management, data privacy and data integrity capabilities. In total, there are around 50 colleagues directly in our data office, with the addition of several multi-disciplinary squads working indirectly as part of the team.
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