Lauren Exell, Robotic Process Automation, Lloyds Banking Group, treats us to a review of a great Data Meet-up, in March 2019.
On Thursday night, Women in Data partnered with Lloyds Banking Group to host a meet up in our London Wall office. It was a fantastic evening, with 5 brilliant speakers and plenty of networking to follow.
The evening started with David Storey, who is a Partner at EY. He did a fascinating talk on Future Work and Capabilities in the age of Digital. This – somewhat scary – session, looked at the trends over the past 100 years and then looked forward in to what we might see in the future. He showed that the implications of business disruption and technology adoption for talent and leadership are vast: deep analytics and technologies are providing new insight to predict and manage human fit and enhance performance, while technologies are emerging that reduce or speed up tasks, thereby reducing and redefining human roles and jobs.
David showed an estimate by World Economic Forum that by 2022 75m roles will be displaced and 133m will be new, thus requiring augmentation and re-skilling. He showed a number of roles, and the proportion of which could be automated, in many services including Financial Services. To manage this change in capabilities, organisations will need to: managing role disruption, identifying future capabilities, and creating a workforce strategy for this change. Altogether, an interesting and insightful session demonstrating how the workforce will drastically change in the coming years.
We then went on to a session by Barry Panayi, our very own Chief Data Officer, who went through diversity within teams. He showed a fantastic, albeit shocking, video demonstrating how prominent black women such as Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, Ida B. Wells and others are recognised by the big AI platforms (Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google) as being male. If AI platforms are using these predictions to make vast estimations about our world, you can see how troubling this really is.
Barry then talked through a Hackathon that had recently taken place at Lloyds, and showing what the bank is doing to tackle these issues.
Next up was Jemma Waters (LBG) and Debbie Forster MBE, who talked through the Tech Talent Charter. This is the largest study of its kind in the UK, which undertakes 9,000 interviews to understand the digital skills of the UK. Some shocking statistics come out of this study, such as the fact that 10% of the workforce don’t have digital capability, and that the UK plc could make £85bn a year more annually if SMEs had the right tech and skills.
The penultimate session was hosted by our own Philippa Milner-Jones, who is Head of Data Modelling in Retail Credit Risk at Lloyds. In light of International Women’s Day, Philippa went through some of the things women are better than men at – multi-tasking, driving and coding to name a few! She then outlined some of her top tips for a successful career in Data Analytics, such as seizing opportunities, being inquisitive and loving your job. Altogether, a very inspirational and well put together session.
Finally, it was time for the interactive session! This was hosted by Jcurv, a company who has helped Lloyds transition in to Agile ways of working. Jcurv asked attendees to get in to teams of 5 in order to make paper aeroplanes. Each team was responsible for one section of the construction of the aeroplane, for example, one fold. Then, it was time for round 2. Each team made the whole paper aeroplane themselves as a team. What was the result? Obviously, more aeroplanes were made when everyone in one team worked together, showing how when you have all the right skills in one team working together, we are more efficient and successful!
The evening was finished off by a round of networking and canapés, where attendees could make connections with like-minded people in the industry. An extremely successful evening all round, and a partnership between Lloyds and Women in Data that will definitely last for years to come!
