At The Data Shed, we prioritise helping financial enterprise unlock the value in the data they hold.
Through a combination of tried and tested approaches alongside the use of cutting-edge technology in machine learning, architecture, and platforms, our financial clients look to The Data Shed to tackle projects on everything from Cloud Migration to Unifying Data systems, and Machine Learning. More on those here.
Having worked in a variety of financial organisations, including Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Skipton Building Society, our Shedders are well placed to understand your needs and solve your problems.
So, whether you’re trying to make better-informed business decisions, reduce risk, or get the most out of your data, our award-winning services can provide outstanding value and insight for your company.
Our expertise and experience sit across three key focus areas:
- Consult & Advise
We consult and advise aspirational businesses, facilitating organisational synergy by:
- Aligning data strategy with business strategy.
- Providing fractional CDO/CTO Support​.
- Delivering discovery projects or fostering long-term partnership engagements.
- Create & Deliver
We create and deliver new business platforms, systems architectures, and data governance programmes, as well as provide expertise to expand your internal teams. Projects include:
- Data platform migration​.
- Data integration and matching​.
- Data architecture and modelling​.
- Data strategy implementation​.
- Business intelligence and advanced analytics.
- Manage & Maintain
We help you manage and maintain your data systems and architecture to ensure the most efficient return on investment. This is achieved through:
- Managed service/data platform technical operations.
- Continuous improvement programmes​.
- Continual ROI unlocking.
Wondering how do we do this?
At The Data Shed we align ourselves closely with several full system development lifecycles to ensure best practice throughout our project deliveries. This includes using Government Digital Service (GDS) service manual standards, Agile and Waterfall methodologies and an internal squad-based approach to creating teams.
We also focus on, and promote, the following approaches and principles in all our data strategy developments:
- Get stuff done properly, first time around.
- Make it right and only then make it fast.
- Spend as much time thinking about tests and security as writing code.
- Work with a team of like-minded high-calibre engineers to translate user requirements into working code.
- Assist in the progress of others.
- Lead definition and maintenance of best practice standards in development, design principles and process.
- Have excellent teamwork, leadership and communication skills.
- Fail fast/celebrate mistakes!
Our multidisciplinary squads have broad technical experience across a wide range of platforms including AWS, Azure and best of breed on premise solutions.
With a range of skills in different technical languages and frameworks, this allows them to bring different perspectives when solving complex problems across intricate financial organisations.
Likewise, each squad’s technical breath is always augmented through specialist technical team members with a depth of experience in security, architecture, data science, analytics and delivery.
The Data Shed is an award-winning data strategy, engineering, and analytics consultancy​, that was established in August 2013 by Anna Sutton and Ed Thewlis. Specialising in data integration and analytical projects both large and small, The Data Shed work with a wide range of clients across Financial Services, Insurance, MedTech, Healthcare, and beyond, with our focus always remaining on driving value and providing insight from any data project.
The initial idea for The Shed was borne of frustration from business leaders who were struggling to put trustworthy analytics in the hands of key decision makers. Anna and Ed identified this pain and combined tech, marketing and commercial skills, with a dose of common sense and pragmatism, to create “value first†data solutions that meet the needs of the client.
Today, The Data Shed consists of 60+ Shedders, including talented data engineers, business analysts, consultants, and more. We still love data and we’re proud of the projects we’ve delivered to our clients, more on those here,winning countless awards in the process including the GP Bullhound Northern Tech Awards, Data for Good Initiative of the Year at the British Data Awards and the Business Desk Business Masters, Employer of the Year.
Our talented Shedders have worked with the likes of Equifax, Sunlife and Loans at Home, utilising their expertise and our own software to support the goal of making accurate data insight accessible to all, no matter the size of budget or technical prowess.
Most important of all, we believe in being trustworthy, transparent, and reliable.
Iterative proof of concepts, and a value first approach, ensure our clients are getting value from their data as fast as possible.​ That means we don’t need you to know everything before you start – rather that all data projects are a voyage of discovery, and we work with our clients to flex our approach as we go.​
The most important questions in any data project are how is the data going to be consumed, by who, and to drive what outcome? As such, to this day, our mission remains the same as ever, to help our clients spark and embrace their own data evolution.
Ed Thewlis, CCO & Co-Founder
James Mackenzie, Associate Director – Commercial
Ed Hiley, CTO
