Lee Fulmer, chief data officer, UBS Investment Bank

What has been your path to power?

When I started out, roles like data scientists or chief data officers didn’t exist and data wasn’t treated as a discipline. Most large firms had large data processing teams pulling data dumps from applications and manipulating them with tools like SPSS and Mathematica. All this statistical analysis didn’t always make business sense, so I realised data was only half the story. I started learning about organisational behaviour and identifying people who understood the business processes generating the data I was looking at who could add context. My goal was to turn data in to meaningful information.

This approach landed me at the forefront of the knowledge management boom, but where my colleagues were trying to extract knowledge from people to put in to systems, I continued focusing on codifying the people to provide context to the data. If I look back at my career now, I can see the precursor to today’s machine learning-driven data science in my human context-powered data analysis, so I was fortunate to be in a position to capitalise on the data revolution. The techniques I developed still work with teams of data scientists as they did with data processors.