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Scott Logie, Chief Commercial Officer, Sagacity

Scott Logie, Chief Commercial Officer, Sagacity

Describe your career to date

Following a degree in statistics, I was keen to work in marketing. Little did I know at the time that there was a full career to be had in working in data for marketing. And, boy, what a fun career. After a rubbish job at BAe systems, I chanced upon a role at CACI, and the die was cast. The chance at a young age to work with big brands, to use numbers and statistics in a fast moving environment and to be able to combine technical work with client engagement was just fantastic. I then have had roles on both the client side – leading a large data team in a big bank – and agency side, with eventually running data based businesses over the last 20 years. And I’ve loved (almost) every minute.

What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?

I think I have been very lucky to be able to combine a love of statistics and data with enjoying presenting and meeting new people, and existing clients. Basically data storytelling although it wasn’t ever described as such!

What level of data maturity do you typically encounter across your client base and what tends to hold this back?

To be honest, it is a very mixed bag. It isn’t even easy to say that certain sectors are more or less mature. In general, it seems to be organisation specific where a person or a team of people have taken the organisation, sorted out their basic data needs and then helped them to grow and mature. There are lots of examples, often highlighted by Data IQ, of these individuals.

What trends are you seeing in terms of the data and analytics resources your clients are demanding from you?

Resource is tight, across the board. Automation is making some difference but not enough. As the demand for data knowledge increases, there are simply not enough data based people around to fill the gaps. As an agency we suffer this, but it is probably even more so with brands. As such, we are often being asked to fill the gaps either with solutions, automation or even people.

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your clients and on the industry as a whole?

Personally, I think resource will dominate, partly because of the shortage of skilled people and partly because of budgets and the tightening of these. Outside of resource, and maybe related to, automation and the use of AI and machine learning will continue to develop. However, the challenge here is often around the quality of data available and ensuring the basic infrastructure is in place.

How are you developing the data literacy of a) your own organisation and b) your clients?

As a data consultancy, clearly we feel we are very data literate but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve. We follow a see it, do it, teach it approach to helping people learn in a practical and engaging manner.

For our clients, we really see that as our key role – helping them get to grips with their data, make sense of it and then use it. For us that is a combination of practical data skills combined with more creative uses of data and ensuring everything we do is embedded in the organisation going forward.

How are you tackling the challenge of attracting, nurturing and retaining talent?

We have set our task very clearly to recruit and mature younger people into our organisation. Experience is irreplaceable, sure, but becoming rarer and more expensive, so looking for young talent and growing it is vital.

Scott Logie
has been included in:

100 Enablers 2023 (EMEA)

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Scott Logie, Chief Commercial Officer, Sagacity

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

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

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