EnergyAustralia appoints new chief data officer

EnergyAustralia has appointed Alicia Thomas as its chief data officer, following the departure of former chief data and analytics officer Sam Kline.

Thomas was appointed to the role in November last year, and her appointment was confirmed to iTnews by a spokesperson for the utility.

She was previously head of technology service excellence at EnergyAustralia.

Kline, who spent two years in the CDAO role, revealed that he has since taken on a strategy role at AWS.

Kline's role with AWS stretches across Australia and New Zealand.

He will "work with key customers to help shape and define their data strategy and analytics value-driven use cases".

During Kline’s time at EnergyAustralia, he pushed the company’s data and analytics strategy and agenda, including migrating all data and analytics capabilities onto a cloud-based ecosystem, while decommissioning legacy structure.

Prior to EnergyAustralia, Kline spent close to 20 years with ANZ Banking Group, most notably as its head of data strategy and transformation for group risk from 2019 to 2020.

He first started with the bank under its graduate program before holdng various senior positions including ANZ customer understanding and insight strategy and design lead where he worked on the bank's 'strategic next best conversation' (SNBC) project.

While at the bank, Kline also took on multiple leadership roles across data strategy, transformation and analytics.