What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
N Brown has been getting value out of data for over 150 years, but it was only recently that data has been elevated from an “enabler” to one of the company’s five strategic pillars. We now have a data strategy outlining how we will “establish data as an asset to win”, and we are at the start of this exciting transformation.
Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
As part of the target operating model pillar of our data strategy, we have formed a central group data function spanning five core disciplines: data management, engineering, science, analytics and visualisation. This function sits alongside the rest of the C-suite (operations, finance etc), and the majority of our capacity (50-plus UK-based colleagues, with material growth planned through centralisation and new hires over the next three years) is spread across data-driven or data-enabled agile “squads”, with the heads of the respective disciplines acting as “chapter leads”. While people are central to our strategy, the significant financial and political capital required to deliver the planned transformation are also very important.