Brian Hills, chief executive, The Data Lab
Describe your career to date
I started my career in telecoms, working for HP in test and measurement as a software engineer. One day I found myself in a datacentre of a large telco analysing data and identified the needle in the haystack that lead to uncovering a large case of fraud – I was then hooked on data and analytics. I moved on to work at the University of Edinburgh with astronomers, helping to deploy machine learning models to analyse sky surveys, then back into industry with Sumerian, helping large financial institutions analyse and optimise their IT estates, progressing to lead my first data team.
I moved to Skyscanner to start and build the data team, supporting the growth of the organisation over two years, from 170 people in one office to more than 650 people in six offices around the world. In 2015, I joined The Data Lab to help Scotland realise the economic and social benefit of data and AI through developing a portfolio of services across innovation, skills and community. I have led product development and data science, and moved to CEO in 2022.
What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?
Ultimately, it’s a passion for the purpose of what we do: changing lives and creating new opportunities for our economy and society by catalysing pioneering collaborations across industry, academia and the public sector, anchored in our values of support, respect, innovate and grow.
What level of data maturity do you see across the data industry and what tends to hold this back?
There is still such a wide spectrum of data maturity across organisations. On the SME and public sector side we work with many organisations who have either not started, or are taking their first tentative steps on their data journey. Key points of friction are: strategy – understanding how data can play a key part of an organisation’s strategy; investment – many organisations lack the investment to move forward, or perceive the investment as too expensive; skills – what skills to hire and how to access/compete on benefits; suppliers – what suppliers to engage with and how to work with them to deliver success. Larger organisations have more resources to tackle many of these challenges and there are well understood playbooks to create data functions. The key challenge for them is access to talent.
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