Strategic Data & AI Leader · Founder, CJ Chase Business Solutions

Mark Lugg

My career began in management information and data warehousing, building reporting systems from the ground up, writing SQL, designing the pipelines underneath. That technical grounding still matters, because it means I understand what's actually possible rather than just what sounds good in a strategy deck.

But the longer I spent in data, the clearer it became that the real constraint was never the technology. The organisations that made progress were the ones where a leader had decided data mattered and created the conditions for it to be used well. That gap, between technical capability and business leadership, is what drew me into strategy, programme delivery and organisational change, and later into founding CJ Chase Business Solutions in 2019.

Since then I've worked across pharmaceuticals, energy, legal and financial services, and the public sector, at the very top of the scale, leading two concurrent programmes with a combined budget of around $15M at AstraZeneca and helping create nationally embedded data products at the Met Office, and at the other end, helping a single person cut a day's manual work down to five minutes. I bring the same quality of thinking to both.

One piece of work I'm particularly proud of was at the Met Office. I was asked to lead a discovery project into a genuinely new idea for the organisation, delivering Weather and Climate data through channel partners rather than direct to customers. The discovery made the case, and we then implemented it: the Climate Data Portal launched ahead of schedule at the 2022 ESRI conference, the Air Quality Data Portal followed, and both are now part of the Met Office's publicly reported national strategy, with the channel-partner model opening the door to further partner opportunities.

I hold a BSc in Business Information Systems from Bournemouth University, along with MSP and PRINCE2 practitioner qualifications and a Postgraduate Certificate in Business Administration with Distinction from the Open University, where I'm currently completing an MBA, formalising 20 years of applied learning with a structured academic framework.

In 2026 I published The Untapped Advantage, a business leader's guide to making data your most powerful asset, the distilled version of everything this work has taught me. I've also written Pirate Joe, a business adventure for younger readers, because the clearest test of understanding something is whether you can explain it simply.