Sewell Estates has announced Claire Harrison as the new CEO of Parallel Data Intelligence.
Sewell Estates invested in Parallel – a web application development company specialising in interactive mapping and date visualisation – alongside its public sector partner, Community Health Partnerships, in November 2020, after utilising its mapping tool on behalf of NHS and local authority customers. Parallel supports public sector clients across England to make decisions about their services, estates, and budgets, through a ‘market-leading’ web application, SHAPE (Strategic Health Asset Planning and Evaluation), which specialises in interactive mapping and data visualisation. With the recent appointment of a new CEO, and ‘a demonstratable increase’ in application users, the business is now looking to grow its team by recruiting a new front-end developer, following the recent appointment of a Data Project lead.
Claire Harrison has been with Sewell Group for 10 years, beginning her time there leading the company’s Communications team, and, by the age of 35, was an integral part of the senior leadership team. She said: “Parallel has one simple ethos – to improve the health of the population, so to be given the opportunity to become the CEO of a forward-thinking tech business of this nature with such a powerful mapping tool at its disposal is a very exciting prospect. The information that we map plays a critical role in the decision-making process for NHS bodies across the country.”
Sewell Estates MD, Jo Barnes, added: “Before we acquired Parallel, there were already real synergies in what we do with estates analysis and service delivery data. Parallel was a strategic investment for us, giving us the extra strength and depth in problem-solving analysis to provide our public sector customers with even more robust, evidence-based information for estates and service planning.
“Sewell Estates has an ambition to continue to grow, finding new and creative ways to support our customers, and this investment really fits the bill. Claire as CEO will help us bring a fresh new perspective to Parallel, how we position it within such a niche sector, and how we continue to meet and exceed our customers’ needs. Parallel helps major organisations, including Public Health England, the NHS, and local authorities, to make decisions around estates planning, and look at where services could be best situated in relation to population and demographics, accessibility, clinical activity, environmental factors, and more.”