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Helen Mannion, Global Data Director, Specsavers

Helen Mannion, Global Data Director, Specsavers

Describe your career to date

I fell into data and, while I have worked in a variety of roles, there were really three defining moments that have shaped my career: I struggled at school, but my many failures and eventual successes taught me to believe in myself; surrounding myself with inspiring and supportive people; and having the grit to keep going. Today my grit helps me deliver Specsavers’ data transformation, creating global data foundations, capabilities, and culture for the future.

Five years in, data is making a significant impact; underpinning several large-scale programmes delivering millions of pounds to the bottom line and driving right to the heart of the company’s strategy and purpose.

The second was the realisation that I was getting in the way of my own success. I gained the courage to step out of my comfort zone. I took control of my life (in and outside of work). I thought bigger, asked for what I wanted, set up a business, applied for non-exec positions and started to develop my personal brand. Today I continue to advise executive boards and share my passion for data and leadership through writing articles, creating podcasts, speaking at events, and coaching individuals.

Thirdly, I recognised that the better the leader I am, the greater the impact I can make. I became more self-aware and focused on the person I needed to be to ensure my team and colleagues were successful. Creating a caring culture, with clear purpose and the environment to help people grow is very important to me.

This year the global data team has retained 100% of its talent, won Best Place to Work in Data at the British Data Awards and I am honoured to have won Best Data and Analytics Leader at the prestigious DataIQ Awards.

Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?

Enabling individuals to create value from data is a core part of our strategy. We have a dedicated enablement function to make sure we are always thinking about how to achieve this across all functions and regions. As a global data team, we focus on establishing a series of products and services to help users up-skill and create value at pace. We have four key products and services:

Our data community has grown organically over the years. The handful of frustrated, angry analytics professionals unable to perform their roles in 2019, have become our greatest supporters and the bedrock of our highly engaged data community. This now spans 450 individuals globally. Through successfully helping people upskill our community has grown by 30% in the last six months alone.

Prototyping a service to support teams within the business who want to self-serve, but do not have the data skills to get started. We partner with teams to get them started, and simultaneously train them how to continue to develop and maintain their own data projects.

Working with our learning and development department, we are establishing multiple global offerings. Our data excellence programme is focused on technical learning pathways, data agents aimed at creating catalysts for change across business functions, and data mindset designed for our leadership community to help them spot possibilities and drive value.

Ensuring we have the tools and well organised, clearly documented global data models, means we can support different skill levels and help users deliver at pace.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organisation or just the data function?

Our data long term framework sets out three core ambitions to ensure the whole organisation is prepared for the revolution that AI is creating.

We are building data foundations to make data easier to use and drive more accurate decisions. In a world where automated decisioning is commonplace, the quality of your information becomes paramount to the decisions you make. Enabling AI products and services at scale and end-to-end across our organisation is our ambition, and to do this we need to make data simple and easy to use.

Our ambition is to create a workforce that can spot data and AI possibilities and drive more value from our data foundations, products, and services. We aim to have advanced data skills and capabilities embedded into all business functions across the organisation and be able to build products and provide insight that drive our purpose to change lives through better sight and hearing.

In our personal lives we are all tapping into AI, often without even realising it. Our ambition is to create intuitive data products embedded into operational processes and technology solutions, that are so simple to use that colleagues hardly notice they are using them.

Helen Mannion
has been included in:

100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2021 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
No. 5 100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)
No. 8 100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)