25 years of enterprise data.
Distilled for the boardroom.

My career at ExxonMobil began as a geological consultant, working with the raw data that sits beneath every exploration decision. Over the following two and a half decades, I moved through database administration, enterprise architecture, and eventually into data leadership: Chief Data Architect, Data Chief, and the person responsible for a central data team and a global community of thousands of data professionals.

Along the way, I led programmes in data foundations, energy trading and risk management, SCADA operations, master data management, AI readiness, and data governance across some of the most data-intensive environments in the world. I know what it looks like when data works, and I know what the organisation looks like — and costs — when it doesn't.

In 2026 I founded Grand Cru Data Ltd, which is an independent consultancy built on the conviction that the most important data conversations in any organisation should happen in the boardroom, not the server room. The wine analogy is not an accident. I have spent enough time in executive meetings to know that abstractions fail and metaphors land. When I explain data terroir, data vintages, and data Grand Cru, C-suite leaders understand it immediately, because it connects to something they already understand, know, and value.

My work now is to bring that clarity to leaders and organisations that have a valuable data asset, the ambition to maximise business value using data, and the leadership to execute effectively, but have not yet connected the three. Whether this is through the Data is the New Vineyard™ book, the Vineyard Assessment, Fractional CDO work, or the workshops that accompany the book, the goal is the same: to enable executives to hold a data conversations with confidence, challenge the right assumptions, and lead the change in their organisations generating more business value through data.