ANZ Banking Group has figured out that data is too important to be used only once and then discarded. The bank is now radically overhauling the processes by which its data is handled, stored, recovered, and reused in order to squeeze more value out of it.
Information Strategist Thomas Lucey is working with ANZ to bring data into the forefront of the bank’s thinking. Lucey says, “We’re now looking at data being at the centre point of all of this, and if we can’t get the data journey right, we will not be able to get the digital journey right.”
Ry Crozier reported on ANZ’s data management effort for ITNews:
“The problem we were trying to resolve at ANZ was get better at creating, [ingesting], connecting, maintaining and also governing customer data. “That meant we needed to get better at how we capture the data, have some controls around doing it correctly, and remove the margin of error at the point of capture.
“At the same time, [we needed to] look at once we have captured [the data] and at what has already been captured in legacy systems, and how do we clean that up and make that available for the frontline challenge to be able to reuse it.”This involves some significant cultural change efforts, getting teams and squads within the bank to think about the data they create and to make sure it is clean and formatted in a way that it can be reused by others from the outset. Lucey said he hoped artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies might assist with the data cleansing.
In ANZ’s target information architecture, (hopefully clean) data is ingested into a data lake before it flows out into what Lucey calls a “data river” for reuse. “We look at data from a lake and a river perspective where the lake is the legacy data that’s already in our systems, and then the river is the ability to reuse that data to be able to serve the customer,” he said.
“We’re finding that the data lake needs to be cleansed and there’s a lot of data there, so we’re using tools like master data management, data governance and lots of people to go and cleanse it. But it’s a lot of work.
