Toby Sykes, global head of engineering at QuantumBlack and leader of McKinsey’s center of excellence and innovation for advanced analytics, has been added to the DataIQ 100, an annually published list of the UK’s most influential people in data. “I feel very honored and humbled to join the DataIQ 100,” says Toby. “This achievement really reflects the amazing data engineering capability that we have built, so it is an award for our whole team.”
QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company, is an advanced analytics firm that operates at the intersection of strategy, technology, and design, to improve performance outcomes for organizations. Founded to serve clients in Formula 1 racing, the firm was acquired by McKinsey in 2015.
Based in London, Toby leads a global team of more than 100 data engineers. With the acceleration of digital technology, data plays an increasingly important role in how organizations can operate, improve, and perform. “Rapid digitization has created an explosion of data, and in that, there still remains a lot of untapped value,” Toby says. “Through that data, organizations can get a fact-based view of performance—where things are efficient, or inefficient—in addition to their experiences and gut feelings. We can now combine that to predict how they might perform in the future and optimize for the best performance outcomes.”
One of his favorite recent client projects includes partnering with a global financial services company that is now using predictive models to improve insurance claims performance. “We were able to see how the solutions we built, when operationalized, had a direct link to improved customer experience and claims handling,” he says. QuantumBlack is also leveraging its knowledge of data and analytics for a number of pro-bono initiatives, from increasing diversity in the tech sector to supporting efforts to combat climate change. “Data is so closely associated with business performance but we’re finding applications that help us make a positive change in the world.”
Toby joined the firm in 2016, though his passion for technology began at the age of 8, when he began experimenting with basic coding in the computer room at his elementary school. “I’d code simple games with a dot moving around,” he remembers. “I have an older brother who shared the same interests, and our family was lucky to have computers growing up, so we were always tinkering with them as a hobby.”
In university, Toby studied Latin and Greek, while reading C++ books on the side—“I had a love of languages, whether it was working out grammar in Latin and Greek, or working out logic in coding”—but it was a trip to China that made him consider a career in data. While studying martial arts there, Toby helped his instructor create a website on Kung Fu. “It was the first time I was able to apply technology for a specific purpose, to solve a problem, and I enjoyed it so much I thought I should do it more seriously.”
Today, as global head of engineering, Toby tries to instill this same problem-solving mentality in his teams. He always gives new joiners the same advice: Don’t just care about the technology. Care about the problems you’re trying to solve. “It can be easy for data practitioners to focus purely on what technology to use, instead of which problems can be solved by technology,” he says. “I remind my team not to lose sight of the latter. We have a real opportunity to help our clients solve their biggest challenges with data.”