Ryan Sweeney, data and analytics portfolio manager, Transport for London

What has been your career path to date?

Apart from a summer placement as a GIS analyst before my Masters, I’ve worked at Transport for London (TfL) my entire career. I joined as a graduate transport planner, excited about the vast opportunities and the chance to work on the upcoming London Olympics. I undertook a range of placements, from designing and installing traffic signals to performing spatial analysis to support policy and planning. From these varied placements I knew data analysis was for me and I joined a team as a GIS analyst helping to inform investment plans. I loved the variety of work and the challenge of solving significant problems and responsibility of defining the approach.

My next role introduced me to business intelligence (BI) and, based on my GIS experience, I was given the challenge of better integrating our spatial data with our BI systems. This enabled me to work with many different teams looking at how we could better use the vast amount of data generated on our road network, much of which was untapped or manually processed. I was able to work with colleagues to build interactive reports, dashboards and data visualisations that helped to transform their capabilities and improve performance. I delivered a mechanism of integrating spatial and BI data that provided new insights into our data and became critical to many of our systems.

I ended up as a team leader and then moved to a role working for our chief data officer, looking at how we can become more data-driven and use analytics to improve our capabilities. I now manage a team of data product managers and service managers who work to transform business capabilities through bringing together the skills of our data architects, data scientists, data governance specialists and development teams across TfL. A real focus of my role recently has been changing the data culture at TfL and helping teams to adopt self-service business intelligence - the growth I have seen in this area has been phenomenal.