Alan Grogan, executive lead for Azure Data Platforms, Avanade and Accenture
Describe your career to date
My career started on the Barclays graduate programme and advanced quickly under excellent executive guidance and hard work. Amid the early days of the financial crisis, I was asked by RBS to play a pivotal role in its turnaround. Given the uncertainties of the times, I was given a lot of advice against making the move, but my heart told me that I’d regret not at least trying to help turnaround the critical situation at RBS and across the UK. So, I left Barclays and over the following four years, I had a challenging time delivering a data and analytics transformation roadmap. I left the company having delivered everything I had set out to and more.
I left RBS to gain experience in the start-up market. I then made a long-planned move into consulting with Atos. My successes there led to an opportunity to join IBM Global Business Services as its UK and Ireland executive for data platforms, advanced analytics, and industry 4.0 and IoT.
Eventually wanting a more diversified, stretching and global role, I joined Avanade where I now work between as the global executive lead for data platforms and the Accenture-Microsoft business group leader for data and AI across Europe.
What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?
The lesser talked-about attributes that I feel have helped me are resilience, authenticity and patience. As organisations become more digital, the demands on a data leader mean we must balance the dynamic, fast-paced and global environment with regulation, organisational and market risks, and pace of innovation.
What level of data maturity do you typically encounter across your client base and what tends to hold this back?
Our clients are typically quite mature, having invested patiently over many years to a point where they now have their own unique needs and ambitions. They have made huge progress over the past few years and it is great to see strong alignment between their business and IT departments today.
We have seen a merging of business and data strategies, which is unlocking new areas of value for them. That said, the speed of their adoption of new cloud-based platforms, and associated migration away from legacy and non-strategic technologies is one particular area that is challenging as we assess, plan and execute their migrations. I see many strong decisions being made by senior leadership to unshackle their organisations from such legacy, so I am hopeful that we will see a boost in maturity as the restrictions of these inadequate data systems are lifted.
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