Did you enjoy school?
I didn’t hate it. I was a bit of a geek. A big reason for that was my dad: an early adopter who always had computers at home and got my sisters and me into programming young. We had a Commodore 64 and those huge books of programs you typed in line by line – he wrote one for us to keep track of who’d given us which Christmas present, so we’d get our thankyou letters right. Where my classmates were nervous of breaking these expensive machines, I’d been taught they could be experimented with, so I did, and learned a huge amount that way. That confidence came into school with me – writing choose-your-own-adventure games in BBC BASIC with my best friend at lunch, and one memorable lesson teaching my peers to use spreadsheets when the teacher didn’t know how.
What qualifications do you have?
I studied history and politics at uni, then did a master’s in public policy. I didn’t take a technology track – and honestly, that’s become my edge. I’m a former policy professional turned data and AI strategist, and it’s precisely the non-technical background that lets me bridge the two worlds: I can translate between the deeply technical people and the senior leaders who have to act on what they’re saying, without either side losing the thread.
I’ve always kept up the interest in technology – I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on e-government, back when that was a novel idea. But the most useful thing I’ve got isn’t on any certificate. It’s the willingness to experiment and understand the power of technology that I’ve cultivated since childhood. Something I’m determined to pass on to my kids, and any young women in the next generation thinking about the role they’d like to play in making the system work better for people – because getting the technology right is at the very heart of that.
Has your career path been a smooth transition, a rocky road or a combination of both?
It’s definitely been a path into the unexpected. When my kids worry about career choices, I remind them that the job I do today didn’t exist ten years ago. I started my working life coding in a bunker on a big government IT project, not knowing where it would take me. I always knew I wanted to be in public service, driving the kind of systemic change that genuinely makes life better for people. That pull took me out of the digital projects and into the policy profession in the civil service. Then, when I kept hitting walls trying to get hold of the data I needed to design policy that would actually land for people, I was drawn into data strategy and data leadership. Now I run my own company, something I never imagined doing, building an advisory practice on AI adoption in government.
What is the best career advice you can give to others?
Be really clear, in every role you take on, on what you’re actually there to do. Decide the difference you want to make over your year or two or three in the job, and stay laser-focused on delivering it. Don’t get pulled around by other people’s views of what you should be doing. It does two things: it keeps you focused on achieving your personal goals, and it means you always have a clear story to tell about what you achieved when you’re sitting in the next interview. A big part of being able to make the next step in your career is being able to say, simply and confidently, ‘here’s the difference I made’.
If you had to pick one mentor that had the biggest influence on you, who would it be?
Early in my consulting career, we were all assigned mentors as part of our career development. My mentor – a partner at the firm I enjoyed working with and learned an enormous amount from – made a deliberate point of admitting to me that he still felt, at times, afraid that he’d be ‘found out’. We didn’t have the words ‘imposter syndrome’ back then. What’s stayed with me isn’t the feeling, which is common enough; it’s who said it. A successful, senior man telling a young woman at the very start of her career that the self-doubt never fully goes, and that you can feel it and still be very good at the job. That gave me a reassurance I’ve drawn on ever since.
From where do you draw inspiration?
From a stubborn belief that people deserve public services that treat them as whole human beings, not as individual problems to solve. The work I’m proudest of is a team I set up in Barnet that brought together data from across agencies to support some of the most vulnerable people in the borough into work. Seeing that actually change lives is what’s drawn me to everything since. Closer to home, my two teenagers keep me grounded about what the future really needs to look like. And I take a lot of inspiration from the quiet, capable people across government who get genuinely hard things done and rarely get any of the credit.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced to date?
Building a major government department’s Chief Data Office, pretty much from scratch, and writing its first data strategy to go with it. I walked into a department where data had always been treated as the data team’s problem. Turning that culture around and building a strategy which digital, analytical, policy and front line teams could get behind was tough. The technical side was never really the challenge. The hard part, and the rewarding part, was getting people who’d never had to care about data to see why it mattered for the people we were all there to serve.
What qualities do you feel make a good leader?
The willingness to make a decision when the right choice isn’t obvious. A lot of senior leadership is surfacing and resolving tensions nobody else wants to hold, handling competing pressures with no clean answer, and choosing the best, or least-worst, path rather than letting things drift. People badly underrate how valuable that is for teams operating in challenging and ambiguous territory. One of my favourite insights from Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” is that senior leaders need to feel comfortable disagreeing with each other and pushing through that to reach a genuine consensus. We fight it out, so our teams don’t have to. And then we stand by the decision once it’s made.
From a work viewpoint, what has the last 12 months been like?
Genuinely exciting, and varied. On one side, I’ve been focusing hard on ways to address intractable data-sharing barriers through legislative change. On the other, I’ve been deep in reviewing how the public sector is getting on with adopting AI, and where the benefits, risks and challenges really sit. I’ve spent the last month fully immersed in trying out the latest AI tools on the market, so I really understand what I’m talking about when I’m advising government on how to use this stuff well.
What would you say are the biggest tech-based challenges we face today?
Everyone’s question right now is how to use AI well. Mine is whether we’ve earned the right to yet. AI is only ever as good as the data underneath it, and most of the public sector’s data simply isn’t in a fit state, so a lot of what gets sold as an AI wonder-solution can’t deliver without first fixing the foundations we’ve been putting off for years. It’s really a story of debt – tech debt and data debt. Decades of ageing legacy systems with the data we need locked inside them, often in formats that don’t even talk to each other. None of it is visible or exciting, so it never wins the funding fight against the shiny new thing. But you can’t bolt cutting-edge AI onto a creaking legacy system and expect magic. Until we’re willing to invest in the unglamorous work of paying that debt down, AI in government will keep over-promising and under-delivering. The real challenge isn’t technological; it’s having the patience, and the political will, to fix the plumbing first.
What can be done to encourage more women into the industry?
Honestly, I’d reframe the question. We pour energy into getting women into ‘tech’, as though the only way in is a computer science degree and a developer job. But data is a route in that hardly anyone points to – and in government it’s one where women have risen right to the top. At my last count, over half the chief data officers across central government departments were women, including the Government Chief Data Officer herself, Aimee Smith. It’s a great place to be. Data leadership rewards the skills that get overlooked elsewhere: joining things up, translating between the technical and the human, never losing sight of who a decision is actually for. You don’t need to have been coding since you were ten to be brilliant at it. If we were clearer that data is one of the widest open doors in digital, rather than funnelling everyone towards ‘coding’, far more women would picture themselves walking through it.
Give us a fact about you that most other people wouldn’t know.
I’ve recently started building ad-free games for my kids to play. I’m using AI coding tools of course, but it’s a real lesson in why having some coding knowledge is still an important skill in the vibe-coding era. There’s a nice symmetry to it: the curious kid who wrote choose-your-own-adventure games in BBC BASIC has gone back to building games, only now with an AI sat alongside her.
