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Steven Wyer, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, The Crown Estate

Steven Wyer, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, The Crown Estate

Describe your career to date

My career has been heavily influenced by building analytical muscle memory in my stellar first role, driven by entrepreneurial thinking and collaboration and deliberate role changes to acquire deep expertise across a range of data topics. I am also lucky that I feel calmer internally when the world around me is in chaos; very helpful for transformation.

My first job was as a data analyst in a start-up culture. With the opportunity to work where I saw most value for my skills, I became immersed in operations, finance, technology and business strategy. My goal was to operate as a point of integration and lead through change, with a practical view of how to be successful in complex organisations.

Taking on management roles offered the opportunity of building success through a great team. I’d learnt that having an interested and empathetic manager and a great support network really helps, and was determined to ensure my team felt the same. Those are still vital ingredients for my own professional (and personal) wellbeing.

I moved into organisational transformation, leading the overhaul or uplift of data capability. I have built and led data teams (15 to 1,500 people), often from scratch, across EMEA and APAC (having also relocated internationally three times) and delivered numerous enterprise programmes, frequently under the scrutiny of the regulators (APRA, FSA, Federal Reserve) as well as ambitious business cases. I have worked across financial services, consultancy, telco, FMCG and property, and that diversity of thinking and experience has proven invaluable.

I am fortunate to have worked with world-class teams, creating game changing capability within some of the world’s largest organisations. I like to pass on that experience to fast track the success of others wherever I can, and I do that through a range of volunteering roles.

What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?

The Crown Estate is a wonderfully diverse ecosystem of sectors, capabilities, and data sources. Our data maturity ranges from a newly developed data lake (entry level) through communities of governance, analytics and MI (emerging) to open data initiatives; like the Marine Data Exchange (World Class), a world leading platform which supports the sustainable development of the seabed for major infrastructure projects, including renewable energy.

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

The data and analytics team is around 30 people within the Crown Estate’s digital organisation. We aim to build and strengthen data foundations (evolution), leverage and continuously improve data solutions (exploitation) and evangelise and drive step change capability (revolution).

We provide:

– Data engineering and governance: building scalable and trusted data layers, with balance between data governance and democratisation.

– Data and geospatial analytics/science and MI: creating self-service data mining to draw insights and encourage critical thinking and innovation across our enterprise.

– User experience and product management: sourcing and sharing the voice of customer to create a pipeline of products alongside roadmaps for delivery.

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

The ongoing disruption of “run before walk” expectations, hype, misinformation, over-reliance on external opinion and an unhealthy obsession with data being the end rather than the means, will continue to suffocate data professionals and disrupt transformation capability. We must leverage organisations like DataIQ to pull together as a community to change the narrative.

Other concerns are managing teams, delivery and progress through tough economic headwinds, and tight budgets in a market of high cost talent; driving focus on critical thinking alongside building data literacy; the philosophical, poorly defined and very real challenge of data ethics; and, last but not least how data makes a real impact on the ESG agenda.

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?

Our vision is to deliver frictionless, positive change to drive value and build trust in data. It outlines how we contribute to the digital strategy and illustrates key deliverables for building, and embedding fundamental data capabilities (people, process, technology) for long-term success, while laying a few bets on the future, such as AI, AR, and digital twin.

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

Our core data foundations, such as data platform, policies, and frameworks, are now in place. Getting the data into the hands of the domain experts is the next critical step to understand where our data is, where it needs to be and the journey to close the gap.

Steven Wyer
has been included in:

100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)