Patrick Atallah, Chief Data Officer, NXP Semiconductors

Describe your career to date

I started my career at Sprint International in London; I remember my first job was to train executives on how to use Sprint’s email SW application. I then spent 18 years in the telecom industry, mainly in sales and general management roles in Europe. I mostly worked for US companies, developing private data network solutions for global banks and pharma companies. When voice services were deregulated, I moved into building up European consumer consumption of voice networks. 

With the consolidation into that industry, I took the opportunity to shift to audiovisual, where over the last six years I have developed the first digital transformation of the audiovisual rights holders domain, via a unique number ISAN (ISO). This allows authors, producers, broadcasters, and major media companies to register their media assets into a central registry. It is accessible via web services, reducing the rights calculation from an average of two years to almost real time, and cuts costs dramatically. 

This is where I realised that at the heart of digital transformation was data. Because of this, I have built my own consultancy serving large corporations in Europe and the Middle East. Along the way I have also built a digital marketing agency, with marketing analytics as our key value proposition. I sold my consultancy in 2015 and joined DSM in early 2016. Initially, I was in charge of digital transformation, then for five years led their data analytics globally – from strategy to execution (data engineering, scientists, management, business intelligence), as well as digital innovation with data science for new business models.