Paul Chapman, Global Director of Client Data and Analytics, JLL
Describe your career to date
I started in retail at Tesco, where I was always known as the data guy, providing insights into performance through coloured post-it notes on brown paper. Following that, I moved to easyJet as an Accountant; we had so much data, but we were using Excel as our business information tool. I wanted to create a Treemap visualisation I had seen on the BBC, ultimately leading us to evaluate BI tools and introduce Tableau. I then led the BI programme, developed their world-class centre of excellence, started leading the London Tableau User Group, and was named a Tableau Ambassador. In 2015, I switched to Jones Lang Services (JLL). I was excited by the data journey corporate real estate was on, leading their largest global account team and driving innovation and tool adoption across the BI space while delivering over $40 million of quantified benefit through BI. In 2020, I was named the global lead for BI, Performance Management, and Innovation. I took the work I had previously done and created an international community of 150 data practitioners based across nine countries to maximise our benefits. In 2023, the role evolved to support all 200 of JLL’s work dynamics accounts, creating our data fluency programme to enable our teams and clients to see and understand data and increase insights. I also helped develop the first corporate real estate data and insights platform, JLL Azara, which increased efficiency and productivity and allowed using artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) on data.
How are you developing the data literacy of your organisation, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders?
Creating a data fluency culture is at the heart of what we do as a team and a business. We have two dedicated functions working on different approaches to solving the problem, with a global lead and programme being recruited this year to support the business. We have presented our culture blueprint vision to data leaders at conferences over the past 12 months, and as Peter Drucker says, culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Our culture supports our BI Strategy and is made up of five elements –
• Our Pop Culture, ensuring everyone understands our mission statement, vision, values, and priorities.
• Change management to ensure adoption, value, and a return on investment is created.
• Design thinking to help the business create requirements full of the what with metrics and the why, making data-centric outpower through empowered analysts and modular products reusable across the company.
• Continuous learning, investing in our people’s skills, building programmes to radically improve their capabilities for hard and soft skills, and curating these to shift capability from rookie to rockstars through playbooks, feedback gamification techniques, and external credentials. People have fun while they learn, and we see the results.
• Finally, we unite the community. Our people want to connect, and we make it easy for them with platforms to collaborate and communicate effectively, providing internal and external recognition and reinforcing greatness, encouraging the behaviours we want them to exhibit. Our teams are constantly participating in our gamification development programmes, the Tableau Quest and Alteryx Adventure, which enable them to progress from rookie to rockstar. This year, we are building the Databricks Odessey, our next gamification programme for the latest tool in our suite.
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