About
I started in IT as a systems administrator. The data on the servers interested me more than the servers, so I moved into reporting and then data engineering. Since then I've worked in health insurance, real estate, telecommunications, online gaming and mining.
I'm now Manager, Data Platform at South32, a global mining and metals company. My team runs the data platform, catalogue and governance used by mine sites and corporate teams.
Most of my work is on the people side: hiring, team structure, product ownership, and getting governance into project planning. I also help teams get their data ready for analytics, machine learning and AI.
I write about data products, analytics and platforms in dataREADME, and I'm writing a book on data products. I'm also involved in the Perth Data Engineering meetup.
Build teams
Hiring and structuring data teams around clear ownership.
Write
dataREADME on Substack and a book on data products.
Data + AI
Governed, catalogued data that analytics and AI can use.
Career
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Manager, Data Platform · South32 ↗
Mining & metals
Lead the data platform team. Implemented Microsoft Purview as the central catalogue across Azure Databricks, SQL Server and Power BI, onboarding 15 data domains and 30–50 priority data products. Standardised metrics across mine sites.
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Data Engineering Lead · VGW ↗
Online gaming
Led data engineering for a global online games company: real-time and batch analytics, dbt, data quality testing and cloud warehousing.
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Senior Data Engineer · BT
Telecommunications
Built data pipelines and reporting platforms. Migrated legacy BI workloads to the cloud.
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BI & Data Engineer · JLL
Commercial real estate
Built reporting on property portfolio and facilities data, combining client sources into one model.
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Data & BI Developer · HBF
Health insurance
Built the data warehouse and reporting for member, claims and product analytics.
Book
A practical book on data products
I'm writing a book on how to design, build and run data products, based on what I've learned building data teams in health insurance, gaming and mining.
- Scoping and designing a data product
- Ownership, contracts and interoperability
- Structuring and running the team behind it
Subscribers hear first when pre-orders open.
Talks
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Industry Inner Join v14 ↗
DR Analytics Recruitment · Online
Conversation with Douglas Robertson on machine learning, platform strategy, leadership and writing a book.
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South32 × Microsoft Purview ↗
Microsoft customer story
South32's rollout of Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog.
We're not looking for magic solutions… we're delivering value in steady, visible ways.
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Perth Data Engineering Meetup ↗
Community · Perth
Talks and demos covering real-time analytics, dbt and cloud data warehousing.
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Your event? ↗
I speak about data teams, data products and AI readiness. Get in touch on LinkedIn.
Podcasts
From Sys Admin Skateboards to Effective Data Products
Moving from sysadmin to data leader, measuring the impact of data work, and why networking matters.
Platform Strategy, Leadership and Becoming an Author
Machine learning, platform strategy, leadership and writing a book.