Wesfarmers OneDigital appoints Roger Sniezek as its first chief data officer

Wesfarmers OneDigital has appointed former Coles Group CIO Roger Sniezek as its first chief data officer.

The business division OneDigital was launched by Wesfarmers in 2021 and is led by managing director Nicole Scheffield.

Its role is to drive digital across the Wesfarmers networks in Australia, bringing together digitally native businesses including the Catch marketplace, OnePass membership program and the OneData Group.

Sniezek told Digital Nation Australia, “I will be focused on improving the way our group data is utilised across Wesfarmers. This role will allow OneDigital to work even more closely with the divisions, using advanced analytics to be ever more customer-focussed.”

As chief data officer, Sniezek will be focused on driving data and analytics based decision-making for the business.

“I’m looking forward to help lead the evolution and use of advanced analytics across the Wesfarmers Group to make smart, swift, and commercial decisions,” he said.

“Most of all, I’m looking forward to working with the fantastic team in OneData and collaborating with the teams across Wesfarmers.”

OneData, formerly known as the Advanced Analytics Centre provides a single view of Wesfarmers’ customers in a shared data set.

Sniezek’s previous experience before heading up IT at Coles Group as its CIO was as director at Flybuys, operations and digital director at Groupe Aeroplan Europe (AIMIA) and Digital Director at Nectar.

He told Digital Nation Australia that he will lean on his previous experience in the new role.

“My experience will be very useful in helping our team productise and productionise analytics products in a complex retail technology environment,” he said.

IBM's global chief data officer Inderpal Bhandari told Digital Nation Australia that the chief data officer has gained prominence in the last decade, as businesses recognise the role of data in addressing revenue, efficiencies and security.

“At any given point, the chief data officer’s job might be skewed more towards one dimension than the other,” he said.

Fair warning to Sniezek though, Bhandari cautioned that due to its inherent difficulty, the chief data officer role can often be short-lived.

“In many cases people are in an out within a year or two. And it's got the complexity of understanding both the business strategy, as well as working through the messiness of the data, and then making sure that you can enable the business strategy with it,” he said.

Roger Sniezek, Chief Data Officer, OneDigital.