The people behind an insurer's data transformation

The ambition

Move from established infrastructure to a cloud-first data future.

Greater accessibility to data, a faster pace of innovation and infrastructure built for future growth were driving the move from established on-premise systems to a cloud-first data platform.

But technology was only part of the transformation. Appointing the right Chief Data Officer was a priority, alongside building the senior engineering capability needed to turn the strategy into working infrastructure.

The challenge

Leadership and technical capability had to fit together.

This wasn’t simply a search for an experienced Chief Data Officer. The person needed the credibility to lead significant change, the technical understanding to shape the organisation’s data future and the leadership capability to build the team around it.

The engineering requirement was equally specific. The transformation needed senior specialists with experience across modern cloud data environments, including Snowflake, DBT, Python, Airflow and automated pipeline development.

This wasn’t a collection of vacancies. The leadership and engineering hires were different parts of the same transformation. Getting the individual hires right mattered. Getting them right together mattered more.

The response

We treated the leadership hire and the team build as one transformation.

The Chief Data Officer was the critical first appointment. We knew the Data leadership market and understood who had the experience to lead a transformation of this scale, but experience alone wasn’t enough. We focused on people for whom the opportunity itself would be significant: the chance to shape the data strategy, lead the move to a cloud-first future and build the capability around them.

Knowing the market meant knowing more than who could do the job. It meant understanding who would recognise the opportunity in it.

Appointing the Chief Data Officer took us to phase two: building the senior engineering capability.

Snowflake, DBT, Python and Airflow defined part of the requirement, but technical credentials alone wouldn’t build the team the transformation needed. We identified senior engineers with the technical depth and cloud migration experience to turn the strategy into working infrastructure.