Murtz Daud
Chief Data Officer
St. Andrews Healthcare
Murtz Daud is the Chief Data Officer at St Andrew’s Healthcare, where he leads a department of data experts to address critical clinical and operational challenges through the creation and adoption of value-adding analytical solutions.
Before St Andrew’s, Murtz was a self-employed consultant, working with organisations across diverse sectors, including investment, insurance, finance and healthcare. Murtz has worked on a range of projects – from building data departments from scratch to creating and implementing data strategies and self-service data estates.
Murtz holds an Executive MBA from Aston University, which has helped to form and develop his leadership style, complemented by his technical experience.
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Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.
I started off in a hands-on technical role in the construction and finance sectors, where I delivered data solutions using emerging technologies. After establishing my technical experience, I made the move into self-employed consulting, which built the foundation for my career that followed. Here, I worked with various sectors, including investment, insurance, healthcare, and finance, delivering a diverse portfolio of projects. These projects ranged from setting up new data functions to supporting existing data teams in implementing data strategies and cutting-edge analytical solutions.
Since joining St Andrew’s, my main focus has been empowering my department to leverage innovative and creative analytical approaches to enhance patient outcomes, whilst maintaining a strong emphasis on organisational data governance, data adoption, and data fluency, to ensure informed, value-adding decisions. To further develop my leadership style, I earned an Executive MBA from Aston University. This has equipped me with an effective balance of technical and leadership experience, enabling me to build high-performing teams that deliver cutting-edge data solutions.
What is one of your guiding leadership principles?
Continuously provide autonomy, trust, and personal development opportunities to everyone in the team. This greatly helps to increase motivation and job satisfaction, fosters creativity and innovation, and ultimately improves team performance, which benefits the organisation as a whole.
With disruption being a key theme of the past year, where do you see your role as a CDAO going in the next 1-2 years?
I think organisations have become overly focused on flashy dashboards and quick ML and AI solutions, often overlooking the crucial importance of organisation-wide data governance and quality.
It is imperative to embed an effective data governance strategy that also considers ML and AI. With increasingly diverse user groups requiring access to data, enhancing data fluency is also vital to enable users to effectively interpret and utilise data solutions.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the role as a CDAO?
Understand the culture of your organisation to see where your real challenges lie and ask your customers what keeps them awake at night. You will be surprised at the numerous opportunities available to support them.
Rather than focusing on the newness of the technology, prioritise technology adoption by demonstrating how your solutions will augment and enhance value creation.
Network, network, network! There is a wealth of knowledge to gain from thought leaders in your industry. Many of the obstacles you face in your organisation will be common to the wider data community.
Tell us 3 fun facts about yourself.
- I love football, almost obsessively. For my sins, I am a Man Utd fan.
- I am very health- and fitness-focused and used to be a keen weightlifter.
- I am a big timepiece enthusiast – a fulfilling yet expensive hobby!
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