Tag: data science

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European and African tech skills programme could increase economic ties

Emerging economies in Africa often have relationships with developed nations through dark colonial pasts, but today, digital tech is connecting previously unexpected partners.

Developed nations looking for growth are targeting Africa as an opportunity, but must offer the countries of the continent something in return, and one programme to transfer IT professionals and knowledge between Africa and the Baltic region is an example that goes beyond filling a skills gap.

As Computer Weekly reported recently, IT professionals in Africa are being connected to tech businesses in the Baltic region as part of a European Commission-funded project, known as the Digital Explorers programme.

Fronted by Lithuania-based think tank Osmos, it aims to address skills shortages in the Baltic tech sector, and increase more business and government engagement between the Baltic nations and African countries.

While countries in the Baltic region, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia lead the world in digital business, they lack people. Estonia, for example, while a leading digital nation, has a population of about 1.3 million.

In contrast, countries like Nigeria are lagging in terms of digital economy, but have large and growing IT talent pools. Nigeria, for example, has a population of about 240 million and growing.

But African countries offer more than a skills pool for Europe to tap, with a huge potential market for its goods and services. It’s hoped connecting people through digital technology initiatives, like Digital Explorers, will initiate cooperation between the two regions.

New skills

It also sees African IT professionals learn new skills that can be used to help the economic development in their home countries.

At the Turing College data science school in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, the Digital Explorers programme has already remotely trained 90 junior to mid-level data analysts from Africa. These trainees then travel to and work in the Baltic region, particularly in its rich tech startup sector. It’s hoped the project will create a model for the wider European Union (EU) region to follow.

Cindy Waweru, aged 24, from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, a policy analyst in the city, was invited by the Kenya Private Sector Business Alliance (Kepsa) to take up a role that blended economics with statistical analysis. She had the option of taking up the role in Kenya or Lithuania, and opted for the latter. “Once I saw the Lithuania option, I was pretty intrigued,” she said.

With a degree in economics and statistics from the University of Nairobi, and experience as a policy analyst, Waweru took up a role at research institute Visionary Analytics in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.

“Originally I wanted to become a policy analyst and this could give me the opportunity to be a global one,” Waweru told Computer Weekly. “I have an IT background and worked initially as a data specialist in the Kenyan government. This was pretty important for the programme.”

She is currently on a six-month placement at Visionary Analytics in Vilnius. After that, she will either be offered a role in Lithuania or take her learnings back to Kenya.

In Kenya there will be opportunities for Waweru to work either in the tech sector or with tech-enabled organisations.

She said her international experience could open up more opportunities for her in Kenya. There is a growing tech scene in the East African country, she told Computer Weekly. “They call Kenya the Silicon Savannah,” said Waweru.

Kenya needs to emulate some of the strategies adopted in Europe, and Waweru said one of the main differences she has learned is the cooperation between nations. “I have noticed with in Europe generally and in terms of the framework and their policies that they operate within all EU member states,” she said. “We have something like that with the African Union, but a lot of the policies are led to the national governments. Something like intergovernmental working would help a lot in Africa.”

Waweru hopes the programme will build a good reputation for African talent and lead to more European countries taking advantage of their skills to fill gaps in their workforces.

But the programme is about much more than tech skills, with future business ties a major goal for both sets of economies.

Ashley Immanuel, co-founder and chief operating officer at Nigeria-based Semicolon, which trains software engineers and other technology skills, is an ambassador of the Digital Natives programme.

Immanuel said she is increasingly engaging with Baltic tech firms and tech ecosystems, as well as others across Europe.

She said the Nigerian digital tech market has evolved quite quickly over the past 10 to 15 years. “There is activity in terms of technology startups, and then of course the digital transformation of established companies,” said Immanuel. “Historically in Nigeria, obviously oil and gas has been present, but also some of the larger corporates like banks and finance firms.”

She said there is a huge population in Nigeria and that “people are anxious to find good jobs”, but added: “There has historically been a gap because the human capital that’s available here hasn’t been aligned to employer needs, especially for leading technology companies.”

Baltic nations

In contrast, the Baltic nations have small populations and a large tech sector.

Immanuel said both regions have challenges and that Baltic employers and tech companies she has met have listed access to talent as one of their challenges.

She said there is a mutual desire to learn from each other, as well as potential for business partnerships and relationships. On her travels in Europe, there is a lot of interest in working with African companies, she told Computer Weekly.

Immanual agreed that diversity of the IT workforce is also important, with the rapid development of technologies such as AI, and that Africa and the Baltics’ relationship can contribute to increased diversity.

Žilvinas Švedkauskas, managing director at Osmos, said it creates “unexpected country partnerships”.

“We built the project around people, digital explorers and their digital journeys,” he told Computer Weekly. “We create connections that set the path for more business-to-business and government-to-government type of engagement between countries.”

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From front to back: tech vice-president Dan Lake on Notonthehighstreet.com’s tech strategy

The big news from online marketplace Notonthehighstreet.com (NOTHS) in the build-up to peak trading is its new partnership with delivery platform Deliveroo, announced in September.

NOTHS is one of the early wave of non-food-specific retail businesses partnering with Deliveroo to add speedy fulfilment options to their offering. Screwfix led the charge in 2023, and others such as B&Q, Ann Summers, Wilko, and The Perfume Shop have followed suit in 2024, opening up rapid delivery via the Deliveroo app to London consumers who need their items pronto.

Launching with 15 brands under the umbrella of NOTHS, the partnership enables Deliveroo customers to order personalised gifts on-demand for the first time – via the presence of luxury jewellery and accessories retailer and NOTHS partner Hurley Burley on the app – as well as access to goods from a variety of small non-food businesses.

Paul Wilkinson, Deliveroo product director, paid compliment to his company’s integrations team on a LinkedIn post in October, saying their work means consumers have up-to-date product and availability information “at their fingertips” from launch.

“These use a new dedicated API [application programming interface] that we have designed from the ground up for grocery and retail partners, and it has taken a whole village of amazing people to build and ship this,” he wrote.

Contrastingly, the direct tech integration with NOTHS is non-existent at present, according to Dan Lake, vice-president for technology at the online marketplace. The hardware and software integrations are through the NOTHS brand partners, with a NOTHS logo accompanying brand pages on the Deliveroo app to signify the connection.

“It’s an obvious brand partnership that is beneficial to the business,” Lake says of the Deliveroo tie-up, which he says generates “unprompted NOTHS brand awareness”.

“We’ve not invested anything from a tech point of view, but if it goes very well and we want to scale across the UK, there will be some tech investment needed. This approach buys us time to make our platform easier for integrating into third parties.”

And therein lies the crux of the technology challenge NOTHS faces right now. So much of the focus for the business in its 18 years of operating, since being founded by Holly Tucker in 2006, has been on the consumer experience and its front-end capabilities.

But in the past two years, since Lake’s arrival from high-flying fitness brand and retailer Gymshark, simplifying behind the scenes and exploring where a “buy, not build” approach to technology might be more appropriate has been the name of the game.

Front to back

“We’ve underinvested in the back end,” Lake says. “In the two years I’ve been here, we’ve gone through a lot of change and been purposeful. It’s about going back to what the company was about in the first place –shouting about and supporting small businesses in the UK.”

From a tech perspective, he says, it has been important to articulate NOTHS’s definition of customer is a “dual definition” – encompassing the end consumer, but also the small brands selling through the platform.

“It sounds obvious – and it is obvious internally – but it can get missed on how we decide what we’re going to focus on and invest into,” he says.

Lake’s senior leadership position reports directly to CEO Leanne Rothwell, and he has the responsibility of looking after tech products across the organisation. He acknowledges he joined NOTHS “primarily for the tech challenge”, identifying it as a reverse job to what he faced at Gymshark, where he was engineering director.

When Gymshark went through its exponential growth period, which resulted in its 2020 unicorn status as a £1bn-valued privately-owned business, it needed to internally build out tech to support its core Shopify foundations. At NOTHS, there’s a need to more comprehensively work with tech partners and stop relying on building everything in house.

“At NOTHS, we’re trying to end up in the same space but from the opposite end,” Lake says, adding that the business is looking to buy more tech rather than build it in house. “My view is we should only invest in or own things that are strategically important to us or we would have operational challenges without – we have too much stuff that falls into the commoditised bracket.”

In what might be welcome news for the retail technology ecosystem, NOTHS is now looking for products on the market – where there is commoditisation. Albeit, there is not a bottomless pit for investment.

Lake talks of the need for products within a retail organisation’s tech stack to contribute to strategic and operational performance. With so much built in house, NOTHS finds itself with components that are no longer contributing to either and are “holding us back” – it’s a typical retail legacy system tale of entanglement.

“Everything is owned and maintained, so my focus is on identifying what’s now been commoditised and what have other people done a better job of building – and we can then think about what we can chop away at. After all, we’re not a tier one tech company.”

Fundamental shift

NOTHS has already started its journey of modernisation under Lake’s stewardship. The marketplace has migrated promotional capabilities to a third-party engine platform – Talon One.

“Although pretty simplistic in approach compared to most businesses, it represents the first time we’ve gone out and bought a capability and integrated it in a composable MACH tech way,” Lake says.

“It’s a fundamental shift in thinking internally for the engineering and product teams. We deprecated and removed the old promo engine which – surprise, surprise – we had built. It did one thing and we had the age-old problem that you never come back to it – you go on to the next priority and it becomes a problem for people.”

This change will support in the running of campaigns, but is also set to be a capability utilised as NOTHS explores its options around building a loyalty proposition. “This takes a number of things the tech team shouldn’t need to be involved in off their plate, so we can focus in the investments we want to make,” Lake adds.

With e-commerce stack technology, “the most commoditised” area of retail tech, according to Lake, there’s lots of focus on what to bring in to the NOTHS business in this area: “We’re headless already, but some better decisions probably could have been made – you should own the user experience as it can contribute to strategic differentiation.

“What we hadn’t done in the move to headless was consider the service or integration layers just under that, so we built a load of microservices, some with thin veneers into the monolithic platform. We hadn’t thought about how to take off parts we shouldn’t really own which can be a distraction and they take time with maintenance on bugs.”

NOTHS is using Contentstack from a headless content management system point of view, but a stream of work currently well under way with Kin + Carta and Valtech is focused on better optimising the digital experience.

Lake says the NOTHS search and discovery process starts with its brand partners putting product data in – and this is an area where improvements are sought.

“For trade reasons, we focused on very outer edge of search and discovery and how results had ranked and reranked – and we’re using Google Vertex AI,” he adds. “Search went live last year and there have been marked improvements there. We’re doing tests on browse currently.

“We have circa 450,000 products on the platform, and surfacing the most relevant of those is a big challenge and we have built a load of tech that doesn’t really lean into surfacing the most relevant thing.”

That is being addressed using Google Vertex, and the work with Kin + Carta involves improving data quality and product information management processes so NOTHS can “augment the effects of the AI”.

In terms of AI strategy, a lot will depend on finding the most suitable partners. “A lot of the third-party companies we might buy into will be bringing AI to us because they are integrating it into their products – and that’s great,” Lake says.

“That’s the benefit you find yourself in as a D2C or online business. You can see the pressure on fellow CTOs working for SaaS businesses because there is a race to market – and there will be a number of misses, but we can benefit from that.”

Lake admits NOTHS was looking at how to use AI for search and discovery, “but then Google Vertex came along”. He predicts this type of situation will continue to happen for a while as the AI hype and focus continues.

“Once we have solved some problems and operational issues – and removed friction for partners and internally – we can think about how to utilise AI for something that is really interesting,” he says.

Lake describes his team as a “lean” 40-45 people covering tech and product, and says his leadership style follows a “teach-a-man-to-fish mentality”.

“It’s no good me steaming in and saying, ‘Cut that out, remove this, and go and buy this’, as it won’t build the sustainability in the approach we need,” he says, adding that the team is realising this new working method is aimed at making their lives easier as much as it is part of a method for driving the business forward.

The team covers IT infrastructure, cyber security, and support, with delivery managers, and an engineering team overseeing online, back and front-end, and mobile work across iOS and Android. There are members of the team focused on data analytics and data science, and those looking after platform infrastructure and product management.

“Good people get bought into the culture,” Lake adds.

It is their job to ensure the tech serves the five to six million customers NOTHS has in the UK, but under Lake’s leadership, they are also increasingly focused on making the lives of circa 5,000 marketplace sellers – some of which have started their journeys with Deliveroo this autumn – easier and more fruitful.

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Interview: Raymond Boyle, vice-president of data and analytics, Hyatt Hotels

Raymond Boyle, vice-president of data and analytics at Hyatt Hotels, is an experienced executive who helps his business make the most of its information. He is responsible for Hyatt’s data strategy, governance, engineering, science and analytics capabilities. His team’s data-led insights boost customer and colleague experiences.

“I took the opportunity because I love the role,” says Boyle, who joined Hyatt at the start of 2020, having previously been vice-president for data and analytics at Walmart Labs.

“I was very excited about Hyatt as a company and its culture. It gives me everything I enjoyed doing within the data role, including leading the strategic insights and the governance areas.”

At Hyatt, Boyle reports to Amy Weinberg, senior vice-president for loyalty, brand marketing and consumer insights. He has spent his five years at the firm laying the foundations for a business strategy that puts data at the heart of organisational and operational processes.

“I love working in the travel industry,” he says. “It’s a complex business. As a data leader, you get all the stuff you would ever want in terms of delivering a customer and colleague experience and creating effective digital engagement.”

Boyle’s current role is the latest stop on a 30-year professional journey during which he has used data and analytics to fuel innovation and growth. He recognises the role of data chief has changed significantly during his time in the profession. The impact of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), brings even greater challenges.

“It has been a fascinating area for many years,” he says. “The field of data and AI is changing extremely quickly, including the types of things that we take on, the way technology is implemented, the way people engage with it and the cultures we build around it.”

Building data products

Boyle says much of his day-to-day leadership role at Hyatt involves ensuring people around the business are fluent in data and can engage with information assets. He says the work revolves around “the productisation of data” and developing self-service environments that make things easier for employees and customers.

“We think of data as a product, including all aspects around managing information, designing strategies and creating solutions,” he says. “That work covers the data engineering worlds that care for different parts of the business, the platform organisations that manage our foundations, and the data science and machine learning functions.”

Boyle says Hyatt’s data strategy centres on advancing care through insight-driven decisions and automation. The focal point of this strategy is cultivating the best people and evolving the organisation’s data culture.

“We’re working through how people lead in the organisation and thinking about data fluency and the stewardship of information within the business,” he says. “We focus a lot on customer personalisation and trust. We want to build the ability for the organisation to be perfect with every guest during every step of their journey and continue to personalise how we engage with our customers in a high-security, high-trust framework.”

Boyle is excited about some of the achievements so far. His team ensures the business has the right data capabilities and performance indicators. At the same time, they make sure people across Hyatt have a common understanding of data-led performance.

“That’s taken a lot of great work to automate and simplify the business from an operational perspective, and then a lot more work to ensure we’re growing with intent – that as we do new mergers and acquisitions as an enterprise, that we can connect data and the products into that system smoothly,” he says.

Innovating at pace

A key underlying technology for this approach is the Snowflake AI Data Cloud for Travel and Hospitality, a unified data platform that helps companies exploit their information. Boyle says Hyatt uses Snowflake technology to consolidate enterprise data into a single location.

The switch to Snowflake took two years to complete and was finished by the second quarter of 2024. Boyle says the move to the AI Data Cloud was an important transition. An ever-increasing number of people at Hyatt wanted to use information. However, the company’s legacy environment had capacity constraints.

“We needed to add a ton of compute to the system, and we had some hard decisions to make as we went through that work,” he says. “We had a massive growth in the amount of data people wanted to consume within the business.”

Raymond Boyle headshot

“We think of data as a product, including all aspects around managing information, designing strategies and creating solutions”

Raymond Boyle, Hyatt Hotels

Boyle’s data team approached the Snowflake implementation carefully and pushed components live incrementally. The switch to Snowflake involved some hard graft. Pipelines were refactored, and the security infrastructure was redesigned. He recognises the migration process was a significant technological and cultural challenge.

“You can’t stop running the business while you execute the migration,” he says. “We had to manage the delivery of many new products and capabilities during the migration. There were times when we had to manage duplicate pipelines. A lot of folks had to be engaged in the migration process.”

The data team decommissioned Hyatt’s legacy environments in August. Snowflake is now the company’s scalable data platform. He says the technology allows people across the business to access data for their projects. The AI Data Cloud also cuts the time his team spends on information management.

“Snowflake allows us to innovate faster and drive those outcomes cleanly over time,” he says. “We’re launching more services, so we have more data applications coming into the system fairly quickly, and we’re also benefiting from Snowflake’s work to ensure that other software organisations are building natively on the platform.”

Supporting business growth

Boyle leads a 100-strong data team at Hyatt, including full-time staff and contractors. He says insight and analytics are at the core of the company’s decision-making processes.

“Data is at the heart of how the company functions,” he says. “Our CEO is engaged in data and has led the strategic work around how we think about AI. Data is now a big part of every domain and a core element of how people plan, build and execute.”

Boyle says one of the company’s data priorities right now is personalisation. “We’re focused on following the customer journey and making sure that AI and data drive the properties that we recommend and the search experience and the content people see,” he says. “We want to ensure our customers have a deeper relationship with Hyatt.”

In addition to its work on personalisation, Boyle says the company is rolling out modern pricing-optimisation capabilities globally. His team is also exploring the potential for generative AI capabilities within analytics. He says there’s no straightforward answer as to whether it’s better to build or buy AI technologies and models.

“It’s likely to be a mix, and the result will depend on what we’re trying to achieve at any given time,” he says. “We’ll look at the outcomes, the initiatives, the strategic investments that the company wants to make, and we’ll make decisions based on the speed and the impact that we want to have, and the architectural standards that we want to see within the organisation.”

Boyle says the data organisation he’d like to lead two years from now will use digital innovation to boost customer experiences and business operations. From self-service behind the scenes to fresh services at the front end, he wants Hyatt to continue transforming with data.

“I want our guests to experience Hyatt in a personalised manner and for us to take full advantage of the relationship we have with our customers. I want to push innovations that ensure our relationship with guests is deeper, more meaningful and more trusted across all the different interaction points we have with them,” he says.

“I’d also want our operations to be more efficient and automated. I want to help our organisation grow with intent. I want to ensure that the types of development we want to do as a business, and the growth the organisation wants to see globally, are better, faster and more efficient due to the data we provide.”

Defining the data chief’s role

Boyle has built his career leading data initiatives at major organisations. He understands successful data chiefs will play a key role in helping businesses to thrive in the digital age. However, they shouldn’t fulfil this role in isolation. Boyle says successful data stewardship is a team game that starts at the top of the enterprise.

“The CEO or the executive team should dictate the direction of travel for AI within the organisation,” he says. “When I think about the operating model, it’s about making sure we have clarity around our purpose and the areas the executives believe are the most important things to invest in. The business leaders for the domains must be aligned to that strategy and work to drive value creation in their functions.”

Boyle says the role of digital leaders, whether CDOs, CTOs or CIOs, is to ensure the hardware and software stack helps business leaders achieve their transformational objectives. Internal and external partners must ensure data is published and consumed effectively and safely.

“The tech stack is critical to your success,” he says. “Enterprise architecture plays a huge role, as does cyber security and the privacy and data governance specialists. If you get those things right, you’ll build out your AI services and the back-end data infrastructure to drive your business outcomes. You’ll be able to scale your initiatives at a faster pace.”

Boyle’s best-practice advice for other data leaders is to think of digital change as a team game. “You need to have fluent, transformational thinkers at all levels. You must have technology partners who are a big part of what you’re trying to do and creating high-quality data tooling,” he says.

“You need to get your product management, engineering, architecture, machine learning and science community functioning together, knowing their roles and delivering joined-up processes quickly and cleanly.”

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