Irene Kujembola

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Global leader Data&AI| Strategy to Execution for Fortune500s| $500m+ Data Investment Value

With over 20 years of experience in Fortune 500 companies, I specialize in leading technology organizations to deliver measurable business impact. My expertise lies in transforming complex, legacy environments into modern, cloud-native data platforms, generating over $800 million in value through strategic technology modernization. At Nike, I unlocked multi-million dollar capabilities through data modernization, while at MTN, Africa's largest telecom, I built a $100 million data estate for 70 mi…

Hire Irene

Work

Nike EMEA Data Modernisation

Experience

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
Board Member - BCS Community Board
Oct 2024 - Present
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, promotes wider social and economic progress through the advancement of information technology science and practice. BCS serve over 68,000 members including practitioners, businesses, academics and students, in the UK and internationally.
- Led board operations focusing on ethics and governance for community members.
- Enhanced engagement with member groups through strategic initiatives.
- Implemented governance frameworks to support IT professionals globally.
Nike
Director, Data&AI Architecture/Engineering EMEA @ Nike Inc.
Oct 2021 - Present
- Leading regional data and AI strategy across 13 EMEA markets as member of EMEA Data Leadership Team, driving data modernisation, scaling analytics capabilities through user-centric service design, and building AI-powered solutions that enable personalisation, growth, and operational excellence. Responsible for strategy implementation, stakeholder engagement across business and technology functions, and building data literacy and analytical capabilities organisation-wide.
- Regional Data Strategy & Modernization: Architected and led the regional data and AI strategy across 13 EMEA markets, transitioning legacy foundations to cloud-native infrastructures that unlocked $500M in new business use cases.
- Operational Efficiency & AI/ML Ops: Delivered 65-80% cost avoidance on priority AI/ML initiatives through scalable medallion design patterns and optimized data infrastructure, achieving a 15% improvement in cloud financial efficiency.
- Organizational Adoption & Capability Building: Directed change management initiatives that secured 80%+ adoption of self-service capabilities and reduced time-to-insight by 50% across regional business units.
- ERP Data Strategy: Led the data strategy development for a multi-year SAP S4HANA program, defining master data management frameworks and global migration standards to ensure consistent analytics integration.
Nike
Director, D&AI Architecture/Engineering EMEA @ Nike Inc.
Oct 2021 - Present
- In my role, I have successfully transformed legacy monolithic data platforms into modern platforms, resulting in substantial cost savings and unlock for new business use cases with 65-80% cost avoidance on priority AI/ML use cases that enable productivity as well as promote business scale.
- Led the divestiture of 95% of on-prem, legacy databases and clean-up of 10PB from data lakes and data warehouse enabling data discovery, conform to EU/GDPR regulations and enabling a more agile data product driven environment.
- Defined target state architecture for ~$220M AdTech investments, optimizing media performance and effectiveness.
- Achieved 45% reduction in cloud costs through strategic data infrastructure redesign and rebuild.
- Architecture and Engineering leadership for regional marketplace technology landscape that accelerated architecture/engineering excellence, accelerated delivery of open data ingestion, event driven warehouse mgt system, market activation for SAP S4 HANA, Data privacy/compliance, consumer journey orchestration etc.
IHS Towers
Global Head Platform Eng. &Technology Enablement EMEA
May 2018 - Aug 2021
- Led technology strategy for global platform and data acceleration as well as enterprise-wide analytics capability building across domains to inform a data-driven culture across 10,000+ employees in 9 countries.Instituted a federated platform engineering practice that delivered $160M cumulative value through cloud-native platform development, automated deployment pipelines, DevOps/MLOps frameworks within industry standard engineering excellence.
- Enterprise Service Management, Solution Development & Integration
- Transitioned IHS from a fragmented, siloed setup to a unified and scalable open ecosystem leading to the creation of a single enterprise-wide Integrated Open Network Automation and Asset Management Platform thus enabling real time monitoring/mgmt of 40k+ site footprint as a single intelligent, interoperable system.
- Transformed engineering velocity achieving 70%+ automation in deployment pipelines and 66% reduction in development cycle times through CI/CD implementation, API-first engineering approach, infrastructure as code, and modern development practices
- Scaled engineering operations establishing engineering excellence frameworks, developer experience
- improvements, and modern platform capabilities closing 45% productivity gaps and enabling business-critical application development
PwC
Manager, Data Analytics| Analytics Innovation Lead
Jun 2017 - May 2018
- Led analytics innovation practice valued at ~$250M data modernisation investments for clients in Banking,Private Equity Firms, Retail and Bio-tech, architecting cloud-based analytics platforms and advanced analytics solutions enabling enterprise clients to achieve data-driven transformation. Established service design frameworks, client enablement programs, and change management approaches that ensured successful adoption and sustained business value realisation.
- Client Analytics Transformation & Strategy Implementation
- Delivered $15M data and analytics platform for financial services consortium achieving 3X ROI through
- cloud-based data integration, scalable analytics infrastructure, and self-service BI capabilities enabling
- data-driven insights and operational intelligence
- Designed and executed change management and adoption strategy including executive workshops,
- user training programs, and phased rollout approach, achieving 90% user adoption within 6 months and
- establishing foundation for sustainable analytical culture
- Implemented advanced analytics solutions for mid-sized banking client achieving 40% cost reduction and 60% customer experience improvement through predictive analytics, customer segmentation, AI/ML models, and operational analytics across 6 partner branches
- Analytics Innovation & User-Centric Service Design
- Designed comprehensive analytics observability framework revolutionising data quality monitoring, pipeline telemetry, predictive analytics on risk patterns, and correlation analysis for manufacturing, retail, and financial services clients, reducing compliance and operational risk costs by 60%
- Developed user-centric analytics services through design thinking workshops, user journey mapping,
- and iterative prototyping, ensuring solutions met actual business needs and drove measurable outcome
MTN
Head Data Architecture and Enablement/Business Intelligence Manager
Nov 2013 - May 2017
MTN Group Limited entered the telecommunications scene at the dawn of South Africa’s democracy, in 1994. MTN has grown to have a presence in 24 countries, connecting over 231 million people.
- Architected a $100m+ modern data estate for 70m subscribers.
- Executed multi-year data strategy aligned to GDPR and NDPR.
- Enabled partnerships with international OTT players through data governance.
MTN
Head Data Architecture and Enablement/BI
Nov 2013 - May 2017
- Led the architecture and enablement of the BI analytical roadmap.
- Provided technical advisory for customer insight and predictive analysis.
- Ensured compliance with data management regulations and standards.
MTN Nigeria
Specialist|BI/DataWarehouse-Architecture and Enablement
Apr 2012 - Oct 2013
MTN Nigeria is Nigeria’s leading mobile telecommunications provider serving over 52 million subscribers, with truly national coverage and a fibre network that reaches every state in the nation.
- Provided application support for all Business Intelligence software.
- Ensured compliance with information management standards.
- Analyzed data for strategic decision-making and stakeholder recommendations.
MTN Nigeria
Systems Integration Analyst
Sep 2009 - Mar 2012
- Supported MTN ERP Application – IFS and Oracle/Hyperion.
- Ensured 24/7 application availability for end-users.
- Enhanced application capabilities for functional and reporting purposes.
Computer Warehouse Group Plc- Expert Edge Software
Software Engineer/Oracle Functional Consultant
Jan 2005 - Sep 2009
CWG is a Pan-African systems solutions company specializing in IT services, including communications, integration services, infrastructure services, managed and support services, cloud services, and software.
- Supervised design and deployment of software projects across various domains.
- Established technical support procedures and service level agreements.
- Developed reports and clarified business requirements for new applications.