Robert Kent, chief data officer, Pets at Home
Describe your career to date
I’d spent most of my time in consulting and technology roles which led to me being in business-facing technology roles for a large part of my 30-year career. I then hit a fork in the road and in 2010 I led data and analytics as a business function.
I then spent many fruitful years at the Royal Mail, eight years of which as their first chief data officer, leading the company’s group business intelligence and data science function created from a blank sheet of paper and growing to over 120 data and analytical professionals.
For the past four years, I have been part of the executive team at Pets at Home, to set out and establish the strategy of harnessing the power of data and analytics that will continue to grow the UK pet care business.
What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
Somewhere between data cultured and data native. We are fortunate to have board level representation - in me; tangible financial results which we are measured by; and our business and data strategies are in lock-step. That’s not to say that, by any stretch, we are done and there remains plenty to do to raise the capability across the whole organisation. There is always plenty more we should learn.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
My remit at Pets at Home spans "all things data" and there are 70 colleagues in the UK, covering a range of disciplines – from governance to AI - and they all report into me. We have a small DPO team, a cloud and data lakehouse engineering and platform team, a team of visualisation experts, a CRM and digital analytics team and, last but not least, the data science and insight team.
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