Ian is Managing Director of Data Strategists Ltd, which he formed in 2005. He has been a data and analytics professional for more than 30 years, working in 12 business sectors – both public and private. He has delivered some of the UK’s largest data and analytics transformation programmes as well as a number of global programmes. His experience extends from data management – including delivering single customer view programmes for several organisations – to advanced analytics and insight to generate competitive advantage.

Ian has a strong focus on how to deliver strategy into execution to deliver value and building strong data, analytics and insight teams. He believes that wider business engagement is critical to achieve successful outcomes, with culture, information literacy and an agile approach to the data to analytics delivery cycle critical to success. He has forward deployed analytics ‘translators’ into customer groups for the last 20 years and strongly advocates taking a proactive approach to solve business problems.

He’s a regular conference speaker, often presenting on the importance of ensuring data and analytics programmes are done with the organisation, and not to them, and delivering intelligence into the hands of those who need to make decisions to enable them to achieve real value as a result. He has also run numerous highly regarded workshops on defining and executing data strategies, which underpin this book.