I had been wrapping up a major post carve-out transformation for a global consumer products company with the big-4 consultancy I’d been with for nearly 18 years.

I’d been the Senior Director leading the data stream, which was one amongst a large number of other streams transforming this company.

We’d had a data team on the project which had been super-successful and recognised - there was so much else going on with the ERPs (over 5), CRMs, product master data, procurement system, S&OP forecasting, FP&A planning, reporting and more, and I’d been at the heart of the design, architecture and leadership of this platform.

From an early stage I’d known we’d need to simplify certain things in order to enable the integration. What I realised by the end of the program was that there were so many similarities, and all these systems were off the shelf with some, but not too many customisations.

Meaning if we had templates, and a common data model, we could simplify the whole process. And move away from the traditional custom-designed and custom-built data lakes and warehouses of the last 20 years.

Eventually I felt there was a third act. That is Calon, where I'm trying to reimagine the way we do analytics and data in order to create consistent value with a focus on consumer and industrial products companies

I take a very business and outcome led approach to data strategy, data and digital transformation and post-M&A integration, aiming to identify and acheive meaningful business outcomes.

How did I get there?

I am a data and analytics leader with 26 years experience providing multinational companies with end to end solutions in a variety of situations including post-M&A, digital transformation, finance transformation and operational efficiency.

During my career I spent nearly 20 years at Deloitte Consulting where I was national leader for Analytics & Information Management in Switzerland and had a global role leading Data & Analytics Modernisation.

I realised data was my thing back in 1998 when my first job after university in system testing for EDS / UK Inland Revenue and in order to find test cases from the database, I had to type 'select * from cards' into a black screen and lots of lines of data coming out. And then copy things into Excel, and spend ages trying to find the test cases. I knew there must be more to it than that.

So I learned SQL - the lingua franca of data - and within weeks was doing what it took my colleagues hours to do in minutes.

After that I spent most of the first 5 years of the century in Blueprint, a great consultancy in London where I learned my trade and started to understand the functional side of things, not just the data modelling, pipelines and reports. We were nearly always doing ELT based dimensional modelling back then and I got to know Ralph Kimball.

I didn't really understand the business side of things though until I got to Deloitte in London in 2005. This was like going from being a big fish in a tank, to being a goldfish in an ocean. The scale was incredible. I did some fascinating projects including one where my analyses were part of a report to an UK parliament select group.

I moved to Deloitte in Switzerland then in 2009. The first 5 years or so were really tough from a data and analytics perspective. There were only a few of us (2 when I started) and I learned a lot about how to write proposals in a market where you weren't known for anything.

I did everything - Finance, M&A, operations, strategy, digital - for a variety of industries. I ended up leading a multinational Hadoop project for an insurer, which gave me a step up to lead first of all the EMEA big data community of practice and the country leadership role for data & analytics, as well as being data leader in multinational M&A & Finance programs

I always love to discuss data strategy and its business impact

I live in Zurich, Switzerland with my wife Clare and my dachshund Rolo