Do you get a seat at your clients’ strategic discussions? If not, what will it take to get
you there?
Yes, Microsoft is very fortunate to be a trusted and long-term partner in my clients’ strategic discussions. For example, I was fortunate enough to recently take the data and IT leadership of the Ministry of Defence to our US HQ. We enjoyed a very rich and intense two weeks of briefings and workshops, ranging from data science researchers on new mission capabilities, through to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) on how we counter the threats from increasingly sophisticated nation-state sponsored cyber attacks.
What are your key areas of focus for the business in 2022?
My role can be very broad as I am advising clients on their technology strategy across the full range of Microsoft capabilities. A few clear priorities come to mind. It’s essential that my clients transform their legacy estates, remediating security vulnerabilities and supporting better data cataloguing, collaboration and analysis. For example, many remain heavily reliant on unsupported vintages of Microsoft SQL servers and need to rationalise their inefficient on-premise data centres.
My primary focus though is on enabling new mission capabilities. In the hybrid era MS365, Teams and Viva are essential to collaboration and boosting productivity. Platforms like Power Apps and Power Automate enable rapid low-code and no-code development, making business processes more efficient.
Microsoft Azure is the biggest growth area with my clients increasing their adoption ten-fold over recent years – it is the fundamental enabling infrastructure at home and at the edge, particularly for data analytics, cognitive services and machine learning.
How do you apply your leadership skills a) within your own business and b) on behalf of your clients?
Working with highly complex clients and managing a big team, there is a natural tendency towards accepting the status quo. I try to counter this by creating an environment where it is always safe to challenge what we are doing. I want to encourage a mindset with those around me which is much more entrepreneurial and open to delivering things that have never been done before. I try to lead by example, questioning our most basic assumptions and pushing for things that may not be possible, but are worth exploring, from new commercial models for Microsoft through to rapid pilots of new capabilities to “learn-by-doing”.
What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?
Pragmatism has arguably been the most important attribute for success in this role. Resources are scarce (time, money, skills, network connectivity, compute, etc) so we are forced to make trade-offs. For example, my clients have highly bespoke requirements, like wanting to run AI models in austere environments, so we have to focus on overcoming these practical challenges.
How did you develop – and continue to develop – these skills or attributes?
As with many other data professionals, a lot of my skills were self-taught over the years, usually working on real projects rather than in a classroom. Perhaps it helps that I read Economics at university, which is a relatively empirical field, and have maintained an active interest in quantitative research ever since.
I occasionally do MOOCs through Coursera, EDX and Linkedin Learning. With the pandemic, I also dabbled with Code Academy to improve my limited SQL and Python skills. My favourite data-centric sites are Towards Data Science, KDnuggets, Visual Capitalist, FiveThirtyEight, Works in progress, and Oxford’s Our World In Data. While not strictly about data, the EconTalk, 80,000 hours, and Pin Factory podcasts are particularly informative.