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Matt Crawley, Chief Data Officer, Lebara

Matt Crawley, Chief Data Officer, Lebara

Describe your career to date

I have spent over ten years building data and analytics teams within the telecoms industry. My career started at Sky, then BT, before taking on a different challenge at a smaller organisation in Lebara. Here I built the data, analytics, data science, and business intelligence (BI) function from scratch, taking responsibility for the data strategy, governance, and execution of data capability, supporting our various markets across Europe.

Starting with no team three years ago, we now have over 50 data professionals across the various teams; Engineers to Data Scientists driving insight and capability into all aspects of the organisation. The most important decisions we made here were to get the right tools and infrastructure to allow us to scale and grow at pace, and this has culminated in delivering significant business value from year one and winning the DataIQ award for Best Transformation.

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

Data literacy needs buy in from the top down. Fortunately, at Lebara, we have a massive appetite from the Board and Executives to be a data-driven organisation, which can be seen through the investment in building best-in-class platforms and capabilities which are key to creating an environment where accessing data and insight is easy.

Once you have this backing it is then about empowering the business to use data to enhance what they do; whether this is through self-service, integrating models, or building artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that speed up their job there needs to be a clear benefit rather than a nice to have. This is made possible by having a really clear vision for data, so people know what to expect when and how to prepare for it to maximise the value.

The journey is then to move this from a transactional consultancy type approach to a partnership; by creating Data Owners and Data Stewards within the organisation we all become responsible for the data that we use which speeds up decision making, prioritisation and ultimately the speed to market for data to reshape the business.

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 have always had a rolling five-year vision for data within the organisation. It started with the tools and technologies but even this is impossible without knowing what this is enabling down the road and needs a clear goal of what capabilities these need to underpin.

We are now fully into the run mode of live capability driving real value and change through data. Fortunately, our business strategy has been extremely clear throughout my time at Lebara and that therefore becomes your starting point for any data strategy – how do we intertwine to deliver the right capability at the right time to support major business initiatives. Naturally there needs to be an element set aside too for just trying things that we haven’t thought of that may or may not come off, and especially in a generative AI world we are seeing more of these examples come to life.

Importantly, the Data Strategy is not a strategy for data professionals who then try and force this capability into the business; it is about what change do we need from the business to be able to embrace the data. This includes roles and responsibilities, including new positions, upskilling, and training, delivering self-service tools and setting a clear understanding of how we need to all adapt to make sure we can leverage data to the best of our ability. This ensures the business is constantly aware of what is coming down the road and how they need to prepare for it to maximise the benefit.

Matt Crawley
has been included in:

100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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