Dave Mason, chief data officer, Thales
Describe your career to date
I took a degree in engineering and commerce and have worked in aerospace, defence and security my entire career with roles in project management, engineering and supply chain. Early in my career, working for Marconi/BAE Systems in torpedo engineering and supply chains was a great grounding in complex product/system full lifecycle management. It was an opportunity to learn the nuts and bolts of hardware, software and systems engineering from concept to delivery.
I joined Thales in 2004, where I enjoyed project sub-contracting, outsourcing and running procurement teams for a number of businesses. In 2015, I took on the role of operations and delivery director for the secure information and communications business - running all the portfolios delivering products, systems and services.
I have always had a passion for data-driven management and optimisation - sparked by some early experience in simulation, modelling and statistical analysis. I started working with the central data management and analytics team at Thales UK in 2018 as a ‘development project’, then taking it on as a full time CDO in 2020. We have been doubling the size of the team year on year and creating a great capability that is pleasure to work with every day. I am amazed at the solutions we deliver.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
Data is at the heart of all Thales offerings, from sensor edge to secure multi-domain exploitation. Supporting our customers (internal and external) in their data ambitions is unending. Like most organisations, I can find areas where our work is world class in every aspect of data management and exploitation. In other areas, we still have challenges, but we all share an ever more common vision for where we are going and how we are getting there.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
We have a central ‘digital operations’ team of data engineers, data viz, architects, automation engineers, low code and data science etc. We are based all around our UK sites but our site in Crawley is our largest density of resources. The team is part of our UK operations office, servicing nine businesses across the UK, where we have self-service analysts that are part of our team.
We also have data and AI specialists in each of our business technical teams and as part of our research centre, these are focused on data in our deployed equipment and systems.
We collaborate with Thales group data office and the network of data professionals across the globe, sharing best practice and data/digital products more and more globally.
DataIQ is a trading name of IQ Data Group Limited
10 York Road, London, SE1 7ND
Phone: +44 020 3821 5665
Registered in England: 9900834
Copyright © IQ Data Group Limited 2024