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Chris Yates, Chief Data Officer, Coventry Building Society

Describe your career to date

 

I joined Coventry Building Society (CBS) in September 2022 as Chief Data Officer, with an opportunity to spearhead a data-driven culture for the organisation. The last year has been an amazing journey, completing a major operational model change, consolidating teams from technology and finance to form one data office, introducing a value-based data product structure, and starting to roll out our data culture and literacy programme. 

An unforeseen but critical step in the last 12 months is the introduction of data as a principal risk category for CBS. This has helped raise the agenda of the data office to the Board and allowed us to build significant momentum as we further improve our data management and protection services.

Prior to CBS, I worked at three large global entities in a number of industries such as BunzI, National Grid and GSK. I also was lucky enough to work for an ambitious, medium-sized enterprise that conceived a technology startup for which I helped shape a data and analytics function.

In recent years, my leadership roles started as Head of Data and Analytics for a start-up, where we delivered a new data platform and data science capabilities with a small team. I then went on to heading up BI development and visualisation at Royal Mail, consolidating several teams into product-orientated squads. After Royal Mail, I moved to GSK Consumer Health, building a new data office from the ground up as we shaped the business to separate from the pharma side. In little over two years – during the pandemic – the team grew to over 150, delivering value across all areas of the business.

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

We started to roll out our data literacy programme – Data Empowered Colleagues – this year. The aim is to support our wider data and digital transformation by providing everyone the opportunity to learn key aspects of the data value lifecycle, their role within it, and how to shape fantastic data questions to support their decision making with data storytelling. This programme will result in the formation of an active data academy for every employee, and a data guild for our data professionals across the organisation.

The data academy starts with a survey that opens personalised online training, consisting of tests, videos, and other resources that employees can consume at their leisure. Depending on their role, engagement, and persona, employees are invited to complete an eight-month virtual classroom certification covering a range of soft and technical skills.

The data guild also starts with our personal survey and identifies established or potential data professionals. Again, it offers dedicated certification training up to Level 7 Data Science Apprenticeships, but also will offer work opportunities across short term hackathon events and other key business data initiatives.

All of this is wrapped together with a planned senior manager engagement. This is designed to equip the leaders of the organisation with the tools needed to support our data transformation, by helping them build our data literacy manifesto and learning how to be strong advocates for data-driven questioning and decision making.

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 enterprise data vision and strategy are aimed at the entire organisation and summarised in one statement: “Becoming a data-driven organisation, which uses data in a courageous yet responsible way to deliver growth, excellence, and value for our members.”

This highlights how data is a key enabler of our future success across CBS. Data is becoming a key element across our strategies, values, and processes. It will enable us to meet our ambition to be the best mortgage and savings provider, help us make our everyday and strategic decisions, and put our members first.

This goes deeper when we look at how we activate it across the data strategy, where we highlight the importance of internal and external trust in our use of data, proactively managing data risk, governance, and privacy for our members, customers, regulators, and colleagues. 

 

Focusing on having a truly data-driven mindset and building an understanding of our data enables us to unlock the value of data across the enterprise. It also enables us to build our future capabilities to innovate with data, not only with artificial intelligence and data science, but with data products and models.

Chris Yates
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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