Susanna Moan, Chief Data Officer, Currys
Describe your career to date
My career started and continues with an inherent interest in human behaviour and how data enables insight into behaviour. Like a few of today’s Data leaders, I started my career at dunnhumby, where I was immersed in customer and transaction data for Tesco and Tesco Ireland, delivering data-driven insights and communications across many different areas. It was a tremendous learning ground.
From there, I wanted to broaden my experience and moved to Diageo in Category Strategy and Insights (as a result I am also adept in cocktail making). I then joined Deloitte Consulting in the Consumer Business Strategy team to broaden my strategic skillset further, advising many different retail and consumer clients.
I then moved to Aimia, the owners of the Nectar loyalty programme at the time, staying for almost ten years in various UK and global roles; starting with leading analytics and insight on behalf of Sainsbury’s and ending as CEO of the Sainsbury’s and Nectar Data Monetisation and Retail Media Joint Venture business, now known as Nectar360. During my time there, I was involved in many exciting initiatives such as launching Sainsbury’s first mobile app and advancing our algorithms to significantly increase the level of personalised offers to customers.
In 2019, I joined Compare the Market as their first Chief Data Officer where I led the team to step change the level of insight and data capability for the business, evolved the team identify and op model, and launched the data philanthropy initiative Data4Good; whilst also being responsible for Strategy and PMO for the wider business too.
The CDO role at Currys came knocking, and I was excited to join the UK’s largest tech retailer at a transformational time with such a huge amount of data and the opportunity to make a difference.
Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?
Currys is certainly data hungry yet has been constrained in the past through legacy systems, disconnected data and limited resource – and so part of my team’s focus is to step change this to help colleagues access and use data in the right way to improve both decision making and customer experience. We want to build on that data hunger to further develop Currys colleagues’ data literacy in how they utilise data in their day-to-day ways of working, so that they can read, write, and communicate data in context, and use that data effectively to drive decisions and value.
This starts with improving access and availability of data to meet stakeholder needs and is closely followed by communication. The foundation of our data strategy to date has been to resolve the legacy stack and disconnected data issues by bringing together disparate data into our single cloud platform, and thereby enable my team and the wider business to access what they need nimbly and accurately. Through this programme, we have delivered value iteratively through a set of use cases across Finance, Commercial and
Retail which has helped build understanding, capability, impact, and importantly, advocacy across the business. Beyond these foundations, it is then important to communicate the impact of data and insight. I update our Exco and Group Leadership Team on a regular basis, and we hold a bi-monthly insights forum across the business where new case studies are shared from a wide range of teams to 100+ attendees. We have also built a Data Science Community, not just for those in the Data Office but for relevant data users across the business, which has been invaluable for sharing learnings and progressing adoption of new tech, tools, and techniques faster together.
Within our own team, we use a blend of training with different partners such as Databricks, Data Camp, and DataIQ to support our team to enhance their skills – whether technical or broader business skills – aligned to their development needs.
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