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CW@60: A career in data - it's all about the people that you meet
On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends - experts, trusted contacts, IT leaders and suppliers - for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades
On 22 September 1966, the launch issue of the world’s first weekly technology newspaper was published – today Computer Weekly is the UK’s oldest business IT title. What's changed the most for you since then? Here, former chief data officer Caroline Carruthers reflects on an unexpected life in data.
I sometimes think back to myself as a 21-year-old graduate, sitting there reading Computer Weekly, trying to soak up as much as I possibly could.
To be honest, I didn’t understand everything that I read back then but it didn’t stop me reading. I can still remember that feeling of wanting to understand the world I had stepped into, while also not being entirely sure what that world was.
If I could sit next to that younger version of me and tell her what was coming, I honestly don’t think she would believe me.
Not because she lacked ambition - she had bags of it - but because so many of the things that would go on to define my career barely existed in any recognisable way. There was no obvious path into data because data was not yet a profession in the way we understand it now.
There certainly wasn’t a careers adviser in the north-east of England telling a miner’s daughter that one day she might become a chief data officer, write books, build a business, and spend her career helping organisations solve problems through data.
I watched people like Judith Hann and Maggie Philbin on the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World with complete fascination, but there wasn’t a neat roadmap that said, “This way to being part of it”. There was just a curiosity, and a sense that technology was opening doors, even if I couldn’t yet see where those doors would lead.
No cinematic moment
When I look back over my career, I don’t see one dramatic turning point. There was no single cinematic moment where everything suddenly made sense. I see a series of discoveries that gradually expanded my understanding of what was possible.
I am known for having regular epiphanies - sometimes more regular than is strictly convenient for the people around me - but those epiphanies came from doing the work, asking questions, getting things wrong, learning, and trying again.
One of the earliest things I realised was that I loved solving problems. I didn’t enter technology because I was fascinated by technology for its own sake, but because of what technology lets you do. I remember teaching myself to program on my Commodore 64 and creating new games.
In truth, what appealed to me was making sense of complexity. I’ve always been drawn to patterns, relationships and understanding how things fit together. Long before I found my way into data, I knew that curiosity gave me energy. What changed over time was discovering that technology gave that curiosity somewhere to go, and data gave it a language.
In many ways, my career evolved alongside the discipline itself. I moved through IT, digital and programme management before eventually finding my home in data.
Too many acronyms
Looking back now, it is easy to forget how new so much of this was. Today, data is recognised as a profession with career paths, job titles, communities, frameworks and, occasionally, too many acronyms. When I started, a lot of those structures simply did not exist. The field was still working itself out, and many of us were learning as we went, which is both exciting and mildly terrifying when you are living through it.
Technology is sometimes portrayed as a world of machines and technical experts hidden away from the rest of the organisation, surrounded by cables and questionable coffee. My experience has been the opposite. One of the greatest gifts this profession has given me has been the people.
I have met people who are generous with ideas, willing to challenge assumptions, happy to share mistakes and completely committed to helping one another solve difficult problems. I have watched communities form around emerging disciplines and seen individuals come together to build something bigger than any one organisation could achieve alone.
“There is one career lesson that keeps being reaffirmed for me - what is possible is not fixed”
Caroline Carruthers
Much of the progress we have made in the data profession has come from people being willing to say, “this worked for me”, or more often “this absolutely did not work for me and it hurt”.
That may be the aspect of the digital revolution that has had the greatest impact on my own life. Not just access to technology, but access to people, ideas and communities that would have been unimaginable to that younger version of me sitting in that first IT department.
Down in the basement
The early IT environments were not exactly glamorous. There was the kind of office lighting that made everyone look like they were being interrogated and yes, I was in the basement as part of “the IT crowd”. It could be lonely, especially when you were trying to work out not only what you were doing, but who you were becoming - but there was also something wonderful about it.
There was possibility in those rooms, even if it was wrapped in plastic casing, accompanied by a printer that sounded like it was trying to escape.
There is one career lesson that keeps being reaffirmed for me - what is possible is not fixed.
Every problem we solve expands what we believe can be achieved. Every challenge overcome broadens the horizon a little further. The art of the possible is not a destination and each success, failure and lesson learned gives us a slightly different view of what might come next.
Perhaps that is why periods of technological transformation have always fascinated me. We now find ourselves in another one. Artificial intelligence is transforming organisations and prompting new conversations about how we work, create and make decisions.
The data landscape has shifted too, away from an obsession with compliance at all costs towards richer conversations about where organisations want to go with their data, why, and for whom. It is what I think of as the second coming of data - GDPR being the first.
The possibilities are exciting, but once again we are standing at the edge of a future that is not fully defined.
Curiosity matters
The technology may be different, but the qualities that matter most have not changed. Curiosity still matters. Resilience still matters. The willingness to question assumptions still matters. The ability to imagine alternatives still matters. In fact, imagination may be one of our greatest constraints, not because we lack creativity, but because we can only see the world through the experiences we have already had.
Every one of us operates inside our own information bubble to some extent. The challenge is to keep stretching those boundaries and asking what might come next.
When I reflect on my own career, I see a lifetime of iterative discoveries about how things work, each one nudging the boundary of what I thought was possible a little further out.
So, if I could go back and speak to that young woman in that early IT department, I wouldn’t dwell on the job titles or books or achievements, I would talk about the people she’d meet through tech and data.
Caroline Carruthers is co-author of The Chief Data Officer's Playbook, CEO at Carruthers and Jackson, and former chief data officer at Network Rail.
