In this episode of Fibonacci: the Red Olive Data Podcast, we chat to social housing data expert Barry McNulty from Epictetus Solutions. We discuss Barry's journey from an economics degree and early career in social housing, to becoming a senior leader in data management. Barry shares how better data analysis can provide evidence-based, data-driven decision making in social housing, and the importance of both data governance and cooperation between housing associations. He also gives his perspective on the potential of machine learning in housing and touches on the increasingly important role of data in regulatory requirements.

In this episode of Fibonacci, the Red Olive Data Podcast, we interview James Gardiner, head of data technology for Admiral Group. James has 25 years of experience working with data and has been at Admiral for the past seven years, recently managing its move to the cloud.

We chat about the importance of applying an engineering mindset to data projects, data governance, the art of the possible and more in a wide-ranging chat.

Here are the topics we discuss with their timecodes:

• How James got into data engineering (1m)
• The importance of emphasising an engineering mentality to data teams (6m 9s)
• Giving people the data to make good decisions, including live streams and integrating it with sales processes (7m 17s)
• Understanding customers to give them the best price, while balancing risk (9m)
• Scoping a project and getting both the right people and architecture in place (10m 35s)
• The importance of “the why” of a project (12m 42s)
• Security is one of the cloud’s biggest risks: how to manage that with good governance (14m)
• Training a young team to respond well when things go wrong (17m)
• Applying machine learning to monitoring (19m)
• Mesh architecture and ML Ops (20m 18s)
• Communicating well with your team and re-using code (24m 30s)
• Using data governance as an enabler, rather than a blocker (27m 50s)
• Learning from Red Olive (31m)
• The important skills for people to learn, and data automation (33m 18s)

David Grainger is as reinsurance statistician with MS Amlin, an insurance company that is a leader in the property, marine and reinsurance markets. He has worked in the IT and data space for several years and has been at MS Amlin for the past 12.

David joins us on this episode of Fibonacci, the Red Olive data podcast to talk about the challenges around data in insurance in what is a very conservative industry.

We also discuss where the opportunities are for businesses like MS Amlin that want to use analytics and insights to future-proof their technology investments and bring reporting and business value to the entire organisation.

Here are the topics we discuss with their timecodes:

• The challenges that the technology teams have to keep up with the pace of change in the business (2m 53s)
• The journey from disparate systems to a single, enterprise-wide platform (6m 6s)
• Difficulties in delivering a single platform when there are many individual programmes going on (7m 59s)
• Dangers of projects that are delivered in silos, and a ‘business as usual’ approach (8m 49s)
• Becoming a data-led business when you have multiple, business intelligence tools (12m)
• How the hub and spoke model works for the organisation (14m 26s)
• Tying the Wherescape, Infosphere and reporting platforms together so regulators can see evidence that there is good governance of personal data (14m 57s)
• Improving fraud catching capabilities (17m 11s)
• Becoming leaner to be fitter for the future (18m 22s)
• What to do when programmes don’t deliver their aspirations (20m 27s)
• Moving to the cloud, future-proofed by the Wherescape tool, and working with Red Olive (21m 33s)
• The effect of Brexit on the business, and moving data when the data is in multiple systems (26m 51s)
• The skills a data professional will need entering the industry (30m)