This is a profile from the 2022 version of the DataIQ 100.
The latest list is available here.
Brian Hills, CEO, The Data Lab
What has been your path to power?
I’ve enjoyed working in a number of different industries over my career. I started at Hewlett Packard as a software engineer building real-time monitoring systems for telecoms networks. We realised we were collecting lots of data that was useful for strategic analysis and that was my path to data engineering, analysis and warehousing.
I moved from there to spend a couple of years at University of Edinburgh building middleware to process and apply machine learning algorithms to huge volumes of data from astronomical sky surveys. But I wanted to get back into industry and joined Sumerian, which was an IT consultancy analysing data from complex IT systems, primarily in finance, to predict performance and capacity issues. I spent seven years there developing as a senior analyst, then moved on to my first leadership role as head of analytics.
From there, I had the fantastic opportunity to join Skyscanner and what a journey that was! At the start, I had a team of three delivering analytics to 170 people in Edinburgh, when I left there was a data team of 20 delivering to over 700 people across six international locations. Finally, over seven years ago, I was at a conference where a presenter was pitching the launch of The Data Lab, Scotland’s innovation centre for data. I had a coffee with him, was sold on the mission to help Scotland maximise value from data and AI and joined as head of product management, defining and launching a number of our services and leading the skills and data teams. A couple of years ago, I took the role of deputy CEO to support then CEO Gillian Docherty and am currently interim CEO.
What impact has the pandemic had on your role?
The Data Lab values of support, respect, innovate and grow have been key to helping us navigate this as a team and I think we know a lot more about each other as a result. If one of the team was joined by a pet, child or partner, we’d say hello and have a conversation with them. I remember one day my son coming in from the paddling pool and jumping naked across me on a call. One of my colleagues said, “don’t worry about it - that happened to me last week!”
At the start of Covid-19, we had to cancel our in-progress showcase annual festival DataFest and with all the emerging uncertainty, we would speak individually to each of our team twice a day to make sure they were ok and we adapted with the team over time. Today, it’s great to be back working hybrid and meeting the team again - the ability to have impromptu whiteboard sessions to brainstorm and solve problems was something I missed.
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