Headline Partner

Gary Goldberg, Chief Data Officer, Trading and Shipping, bp

Describe your career to date

 

After starting on a trading desk in the City of London, most of my career has been focused on delivering change and business transformation. In essence, my career has been about identifying opportunities for improvement and solving problems. 

Early on, I solved problems through building trading applications. Latterly, I do this through designing and delivering our data strategy. As I look back over my career, data has been a focus in most of my roles.
Since joining BP in 2019, my focus has been on delivering our data strategy to enable business growth and efficiencies. I am grateful for the incredible team that I have around me and the support of our senior leadership in delivering a data-led future.

I view this as a journey and my job – and my team’s – is to shepherd our staff into a data first approach. I established a data strategy with three phases: data foundations, data culture and tooling, and data monetisation. 

We have hit an inflection point where there is a broad awareness of the importance of data and much of our data foundations have been delivered. Now more of our time is focused on utilising our data assets to help the company to deliver new revenue streams, improve our customer experience, and support a growing analytics capability.

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

 

I find the most powerful way to increase data literacy is by working with data aligned business leaders, to act as data champions: training, newsletters, and our data office presenting in meetings all work well. But when staff hear the messages on the importance of data and our data strategy from their own teams, it is far more powerful. Some examples include:

●    The establishment of a data champion network across our business teams; 
●    The creation of a super users forum to serve as a more technical focus group for enhancements to our data platforms;
●    A data science community of practice, to promote citizen data science;
●    Being active participants in key change programs across all of our businesses.

I am also a big believer of data storytelling, and analogies that equate data to terms that our business already knows and uses. For example, our data strategy is predicated on treating data as an asset. Just like managing any asset, we need to understand what assets we have, where we have them, and any restrictions on their use. This translates well to our data management activity.

What are the key challenges to your data function that you are facing as its leader?

 

I am blessed with an incredible team in our data office, alongside strong executive support, and a cultural transformation that is firmly rooted. My biggest challenge remains legacy system implementations and related business processes. We have a clear vision and data strategy that new-change projects adhere to, but the number of legacy systems – and the data in those – is a challenge that I have to balance day-to-day. 

The cost of remediating legacy data gaps and tactical data choices competes for budget with other possible work. I was recently asked “what is the biggest learning and advice that I would give for business leaders with regards to data?” My simple answer was that fixing legacy data problems is really, really hard so please do not make choices that create more of them.

My approach to the challenge of legacy issues is to focus on the business value and the innovation impact of cleaning up the legacy. We do not have to fix everything urgently, but by prioritising the most impactful items, we can get the most impact from available budgets. 

 

My team has found new approaches to quantify the business value of data improvements. Among these are a valuation model that allows us to assert a market value on any data set and research into new ways to measure the value of the innovation uplift created by data accessibility.

Gary Goldberg
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2020 (GLOBAL)
  • 100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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