Paul Lodge, chief data officer, Department for Work and Pensions

What has been your path to power?

My career has always been focused on the use of evidence-based decision making, from my early career developing operational analysis in the Army which led to my first civilian role using statistical process control in the insurance services sector. This enabled me to develop my technical data and analysis skills in preparation for a move to Accenture which provided the opportunity to develop a really deep technical skillset.

During my eight years at Accenture, I worked up through the development of database schemas for SAP materials management to the cleansing and migration of over 60m unique taxpayer records at HMRC as part of the Modernising PAYE Processing for Customers programme. During this time I was also able to undertake more experimental data and analytics work in the medical imaging sector which allowed us to identify the root causes of relatively high cancer mortality rates in Brazil.

In 2012 I moved on from Accenture into increasingly sophisticated data programmes at Detica and the Home Office, during which time I was responsible for developing social media analytics, biometric analysis and more traditional data warehouse design and build. This led to a fascinating opportunity at the National Crime Agency to build the data and analytics capability required to implement the National Cyber Security Programme.

In March 2017 I was fortunate to be appointed as chief data officer for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The scope of this role is awesome – I have a team of 685 data engineers, data managers, data scientists, statisticians and software developers who are responsible for one of the largest datasets in Europe and for ensuring that we are able to support over 22m UK citizens in times of need.

The consistent theme throughout my career to date has been the use of data and evidence to create insight in support of UK citizens, which is something that I am very proud of.