This is a profile from the 2022 version of the DataIQ 100.
The latest list is available here.
Will Siddall, head of data and analytics, SEGRO
What has been your path to power?
As a schoolboy, I always enjoyed mathematics, and after qualifying as an engineer I found myself naturally drawn to subjects such as modelling, simulation and prediction, or what we may now fashionably call data science. From engineering and my first professional job at Ford, I moved across into business consulting in IBM’s strategy analytics practise, helping clients to transform through the use of data and technology, and eventually leading IBM’s advanced analytics work across the utilities industry.
After almost 10 years at IBM, I felt it was time to try something completely different and moved into the energy technology industry, focusing on developing and embedding analytics within products such as smart meters. Over the next five years, I worked for a start-up in London, a spin-off from a Japanese IT firm, a German energy supplier’s innovation team and co-founded an (ultimately unsuccessful) venture to optimise energy use in indoor farms.
In late 2019, the opportunity to join SEGRO arose, presenting a rare chance to build a new data and analytics team within a FTSE 100 company, and the challenge of seeing how my experience from energy and other industries could be transferred into industrial real estate, where the full force of technology-led transformation and disruption has not yet been felt.
What impact has the pandemic had on the role of data in your company/organisation?
Prior to Covid, the business knew that data, and more generally digital and technology-led change, could support our corporate growth plans. Covid has ably demonstrated that in areas such as agility, scalability and proactivity.
Throughout the past two years, we have seen the speed of decision-making required increase, for example, early in the pandemic when customer credit risk analysis came into sharper focus. Such work has highlighted that ensuring our data is easily understood, trusted and accessible is of even greater importance.
The longer-term impact of Covid for us is likely to be its acceleration of online retail, fuelling increased demand for industrial property. Serving that growing market requires us to scale as a company, and here we see a key role for data and analytics in helping automate business processes and providing decision support tools to enable the business to make a greater volume of investment, development and leasing decisions at pace.
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