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Martin Aylward, Head of Data and Tech, EDF

Martin Aylward, Head of Data and Tech, EDF

Please describe your career to date

After a few interesting early roles at the Lord Chancellor’s Office, the Medical Research Council, and American Express, I moved to Royal & Sun Alliance. At RSA I managed to get onto its global digital leadership initiative at the peak of the dot.com boom, which led to me getting a job in the fledgling ecommerce team and a lead role in the creation of More Th>n.

It was in this role that I cut my teeth on all things digital and data and set up the rest of my career. A love of all things French led me to EDF Energy, where I headed up the acquisition and then the customer marketing teams, taking a lead role in relaunching the brand and building the digital marketing capability.

I then led EDF’s smart-metering programme which spanned digital, tech, data, operations, and marketing. EDF installed over two million smart meters during this time, building a key part of the UK’s net zero infrastructure. I then landed the role of leading EDF retail’s data teams in a newly set up data centre of excellence, which transformed EDF’s data capability, and the value delivered by data.

This led to my current role as Head of Data and Tech in EDF’s wholesale markets business, which is at the forefront of the decarbonisation of the UK’s energy industry.

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

Our vision is that everyone in EDF can deliver value using data, so data literacy and data democratisation is a key focus for us. Some of the actions we have taken include:

Rolling out a data literacy programme in our operations division;
Training and accreditation for low- and no-code tools such as Alteryx;
Establishing a thriving data guild that is open to all;
Holding hackathons to encourage non-data people to get involved in data activities;
Encouraging the active movement of people into and out of the data teams to increase data expertise across the organisation.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organisation, particularly with regard to data quality?

One of the key successes of the last 24 months has been to deliver a robust, scalable, secure, and easily usable data platform for our retail business that also delivers numerous value-adding use cases across the business.

The key components include an AWS data lake, a Snowflake data warehouse, and Snowpark and Sagemaker data science developer experience, plus tooling such as Collibra, Matillion, Tableau, Alteryx, and Unica.

Data quality is fundamental to the working of the data platform, and I certainly see data quality as an ongoing activity, rather than something that you fix and forget.

The next stage of our journey is rolling out the data platform to our B2B and wholesale markets businesses, gaining efficiencies while enabling each business flexibility in its use of the platform.

Martin Aylward
has been included in:

100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2021 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)