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James May, Chief Data Officer, St. James’s Place

James May, Chief Data Officer, St. James’s Place

Describe your career to date

I am a data, technology, and change leader experienced at identifying, delivering, and supporting new technologies that help businesses achieve their goals. Over the last 20+ years working in the Professional Services, Legal, and Financial Services Sectors, I gained a passion and significant achievements for large-scale strategy and problem solving in the data and technology space, for creating environments where entrepreneurial spirit and creative thinking are celebrated and where people feel empowered to achieve goals. I build trustworthy and long-lasting relationships with team members, business stakeholders, trusted suppliers, as well as the wider data and technology industry. I inspire teams to achieve their goals by providing clarity, empowerment, and decision making. I instil the importance of understanding the power of data and the imperative of putting it in the hands of the people that use it most through effective data governance, data quality, and data strategy. I assist in designing technology that has clear purpose in life and where success can be easily measured.

How are you developing the data literacy of your organisation, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders?

As Chief Data Officer for St. James’s Place I am sponsoring a programme of data literacy to help people across the group to develop careers of the future. My team and I are focusing data literacy on people, on helping them to get ready for a future where being able to confidently work with and extract the value from data is a necessity. Using ADKAR as a framework for change and adopting augmented reality to bring the subject of data to life, to engage people in how data can help them achieve their personal and team objectives. Data literacy is our flagship CDO programme.

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?

My group wide vision for data is that it becomes the trusted fabric of our business, powering intelligent processes and driving our decision making. We will achieve our vision by strengthening our core which we will do by making it easier to join data together to make it more useful and valuable, creating a credible and high-performing central data capability and setting clear standards to ensure our data is usable, consistent, and accurate. It will be heightened by building for the future by ensuring that people have access to the data they need to make decisions, to use emerging technologies such as generative AI with confidence and providing training to empower people to use their own data.

James May
has been included in:

100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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