7. Nirali Patel, director - data, analytics and insight, Openreach

What has been your path to power?

My interest began at school, where I knew I wanted to do Information Technology as an A-level in an all-girls school, where it was not offered, but my IT teacher fought my corner and I became the first student in that school trust to do an A-level in IT. From there I went on to do a Computing Science degree, where my passion for coding and manipulating data begun. There was no real career path for those skills, and if you were found to be good at Excel / Access, businesses began to use those skills for MI, to understand their business better. I did not have a career plan around data, but knew that I wanted to use my skills and capabilities to improve services.

In summary, what have I done to achieve this vision I had? I started working for a consultancy as a project manager in deploying new systems and processes, where I learnt that while the linkage between people, processes and systems is really critical, having the people buy in is more critical when delivering change.

The next stage and big learning for me was doing the data analytical roles within civil service, analytical businesses and NHS. The various roles have enabled me to learn and practice data management, business intelligence, data science and process re-engineering as an outcome from data insight. The impact of the insight that I delivered led to better patient outcomes and more efficient care pathways.

These broad capabilities helped bring together people and data to take on a role for a few years as the chief data officer for AXA Health, where I led our transformation to cloud and embraced the use of artificial intelligence to make our operations more efficient and effective, whilst understanding consumer behavior and marketing insights.

These three stages of my career have led me here today, where I took a leap of faith to join Openreach just over a year ago. Openreach is organisation that provides the telephone and broadband network to the UK, so a completely different area of expertise from being in the health industry. Here we are accelerating our transformation of a traditional organisation that has a clear appreciation of data and AI. I have recruited over 30 people, delivered a data strategy, set out a roadmap for the whole data journey within Openreach and I am looking forward to delivering more value to our organisation and its partners.