Katie Ward, VP - data, Sage
Describe your career to date
Much of my early career was as a data consultant, building early data warehouses and BI solutions. I didn’t, however, come through the traditional route of a tech degree, having instead studied German and History at university and I worked in a variety of roles, including marketing.
This has contributed to me having a more rounded view, commercial insight, and a more diverse set of skills, which has been beneficial as I have taken on more senior roles.
I started from the ground up in tech: I worked on helpdesks before going out and meeting customers. Working with different verticals on their data solutions, gave me good insight into the different challenges facing companies of different shapes and sizes, in different industries, and helped to shape my thinking around how technology can be used optimally to solve challenges and deliver greater insight into business performance.
My career moved into architecture, which has helped me to understand how strategic thinking and architecture are essential to each other to ensure technology is maximised to meet the demands of the business now and for the future.
Fast forward to today, data is driving a new technology evolution, and my job as an architect and technologist in a newly established chief data office is to bring together business objectives with technology opportunities and change the shape of our thinking around what we can and need to achieve with data now and in the future.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
The Sage data office was formed towards the end of 2021. Since then, we have set a company-wide data vision and strategy and built both a core ‘data office’ team and a virtual ‘data leadership’ team, representing areas across the organisation, to help us on our journey. We are successfully raising awareness of the crucial role data must play in delivering our ambitions and business strategy, as well as the operational importance of data to our business and our customers. We have aligned our data teams across Sage on the key objectives that will remove barriers to success and accelerate the commercial opportunities data presents.
The data journey isn’t one we can take alone as a data office, we need to take our employees across the business with us, therefore, it is vital our colleagues understand how data impacts them and contributes to their success in delivering value for our customers and partners.
Recently we have launched a colleague data pulse survey to gauge opinions on how our colleagues think about data – including how important it is to our business and how it impacts their roles on a day-to-day basis, and where there is room for improvement. We are positive about the difference we are making and are starting to see a change in our colleagues’ thinking and a desire to get directly involved in our data future.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
The Sage data office has three core concerns that the team is built around: value, care, and enablement. My team is accountable for enabling our data ambitions and enabling our colleagues to drive value from data through effective, future-proof architectures and the right data foundations and tools.
My team consists of three parts: a data architecture team, a data management team, and a data transformation team. The team is focused on establishing standard patterns, and common data models to simplify our data foundations and underpin our ability to deliver value faster and reduce complexity. The data transformation team is exploring the art of the possible through data science and working on AI/ML opportunities with our more data-advanced colleagues.
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