• Home
  • >
  • Lauren Sager Weinstein, Chief Data Officer, Transport for London

Lauren Sager Weinstein, Chief Data Officer, Transport for London

Describe your career to date

 

When I started our data function in Transport for London (TfL) in 2007, it was a side piece alongside work developing our Oyster ticketing system. When I then created our Head of Analytics function in 2011, I wondered whether there would be enough work in data to keep me busy. Cut to 2023 and I have built a team of over 100 people, working to bring value from our vast array of transport data, deliver data products and services to our colleagues, and to help Londoners journey across our network.

 

What I love about my role is that as a Chief Data Officer I am really a Chief Data Detective. I get to be curious and ask things like: how can we answer those questions that up until now we have struggled to tackle? What data do we need for this? How do I ensure that the question we are answering with data is the right question for us to answer? Can we take action from our insight?

 

This year, we have worked on some exciting projects. We took what was a Covid-era prototype (and thus fairly hand-cranked to produce) into a new published dashboard on our website (tfl.gov.uk/network-demand-report), where all can immediately see the top ten tube stations by ticketing taps on a given day; Kings Cross-St Pancras, Tottenham Court Road, and Victoria were the top three on an October Saturday. 

 

We are working on a data science prototype to see if we can identify when our buses go on diversion – this is not unusual if we have a road disruption without needing to wait for the bus operations teams to report it. I love that I get to lead such fascinating work with a talented team.

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

 

I have been consumed by a very exciting opportunity working to build our first ever pan-TfL data strategy. We have started this work by completing a data maturity assessment of where we are. We have used the newly published government framework as a model; one of the themes of the assessment is data skills, and a second is data culture. 

 

The assessments are a way to gather a snapshot of our data evidence at a point in time. Even more importantly, they are a chance for us to convene and have conversations across our teams about how we are preparing data, how we consume it, and how we make decisions from it. It has given us the chance to delve into how we support our people who are data technicians and practitioners, but also the importance of helping those who use data, and those who produce data as part of the data lifecycle, understand the role that data can play as an enabler for better actions for us at TfL.

 

What has been clear is that there is a huge demand for me to help set the standards and supporting tools for those who have data in their job titles, but to also build learning and understanding of how data can be used by all of us. My focus is also to reinforce that everyone has a role to play in data and explain that data helps us be better, rather than it being a bureaucratic chore.

 

This is where our data literacy work comes in. We are crafting our data strategy and setting an organisational model for how we are planning to deliver it. There is still work to be done on how specifically we are going to build out our literacy programme, but there is a huge groundswell of support for us to make this happen in the 2024-25 financial year. It is a very exciting time for me to be in my role and I cannot wait to make this happen.

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?

 

I had a grand plan to set out a data vision for TfL as a whole – rather than just my department vision – and I was working on an initial proposition that I was just about to release in February 2020. Life had other plans and I abandoned the data strategy to identify what was happening during the dark days of Covid on our transport network. I had a few false starts trying to reinvigorate the conversation in the year following, but we are now in a place where I can bring us along to think cohesively as an organisation about data.

 

TfL set out a new vision and value proposition, with our first corporate strategy launching last year. This was the perfect hook for us to craft a collective pan-TfL data strategy to support our business strategy, and to guide us on how we build our data capabilities.

 

In order to know where we need to go, we need to know where we are, and so I convened a data maturity assessment for TfL starting in January. TfL is vast, with over 27,000 employees, 6,000 traffic lights, 272 Tube stations, 8,500 buses, and even 40,000 trees. We quickly recognised that with all of this data across the organisation, we needed to break up our data into classes. We settled on a subset of data categories: asset, customer, colleague, financial and revenue, green, etc. I led workshops with both data practitioners and our leaders to gather evidence on where we are on our data journey. 

 

We completed our comprehensive data maturity assessment too, and now have a sense of what we need to work on – data literacy, data governance, and accountability in particular. 

This cannot be just a task for our Chief Data Officer to fix data in TfL, it is a joint opportunity for us to collectively work to define how we want to use data to get better outcomes for us. How can we use data insight and automate tasks so that we can get better performance on our network? How can we use data to provide insight and information to our customers? And how can we tackle the climate emergency and support sustainability by building data capability? 

 

This is not just a data factory task, it is a pan-TfL task, and I have gathered my colleagues together in frequent sessions to debate and discuss where we want to go, and what investment we need to provide in our data foundations to get there. We are right now crafting our data story in our vision document, and my aim is to present it to our executive leadership to get buy-in to our strategy and approach and the resulting investment in data that we need to make it happen.

Lauren Sager Weinstein
has been included in:
  • 100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
  • 100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)
  • No. 9 100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)

Join our membership network of over 250
global senior data and AI leaders.