Headline Partner

Gillian Tomlinson, Group Chief Digital and Data Officer, WEIR Group

Describe your career to date

 

I have 20 years of global cross-industry experience in leading data and digital strategy and transformation. My proven track record of success in developing and executing strategies has resulted in significant business growth, operational cost savings, and innovation. I have led the development of digital and data technologies and platforms, data governance, data management, analytics, and AI capabilities. My industry experience includes public sector institutions, financial services, insurance, retail, telecommunications, mining, and engineering.

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

 

As a FTSE 100 150-year-old organisation, we pride ourselves on being an innovative mining engineering organisation that constantly adapts to servicing the changing needs of our customers and the external environment. In the past three years we have purchased two artificial intelligence (AI) organisations. Digitisation and driving the adoption of digital technologies and data is a critical ingredient to enabling smart mining practices and better servicing our customers. I lead the digital and data strategy at Group level for the organisation and operationally am accountable for delivering the underpinning technology and data capabilities to enable intelligent operations, product design, and customer propositions. We run multiple governance forums and a community of practices across our global organisation, driving data literacy, enabling digital and data capabilities to improve all aspects of our business, and more recently I am leading on generative AI (genAI) with a comprehensive communications and adoption plan which we believe brings a step change to how our organisation will maximise the use of data.

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?

We have a comprehensive data strategy which has been developed to enable our organisation’s digital strategy and more broadly enable all functions across our organisation to maximise the use of data and AI capabilities. We work extensively with the business stakeholders to ensure it remains relevant we are implementing it accordingly and we adapt the strategy where needed.

Gillian Tomlinson
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

Enabling data and AI leaders to drive impact