Using data to drive the future
Want to understand how a business operates? You need to check out its data.
Processes of data creation, acquisition, sharing, transformation, retention and destruction are the lifeblood of an organisation.
If you can understand these, you can understand what’s really happening in an organisation’s value chain and where it may be possible to define new ways of doing things and improving existing operations. How you use data will define your business’s future.
That very concept is what makes NAB’s enterprise data group the bank’s equivalent of a library science team. It involves not just legacy data sources (such as data warehouses) but the development of new capabilities, like a cloud-based data lake and an advanced analytics platform that will give the bank powerful new analytics and machine learning tools that will move the focus from retrospective reporting into predictive analytics. It’s about moving away from making tomorrow’s decisions based solely on yesterday, towards using today’s data to better understand what’s next.
Older reporting systems are still valuable, but they’re being reviewed and refined. For example, while data warehousing platforms are still valuable to the bank, there’s an opportunity to make them more accessible and streamlined by reviewing what’s actually still in use and then moving systems to the cloud so reports are easier to access.
The goal is to use technology to solve specific business problems and help people get to the valuable, actionable insight faster.
More data, more AI, more stewards
A key driver for these changes is the rapidly evolving data environment. Not only is volume and velocity of data a substantial challenge, but the variety of data is forcing businesses to re-evaluate how they store, manage and use it. Traditional data sources were structured, which made them pretty easy to accommodate in traditional systems. But the rise of fast, unstructured data is leading businesses to find new data architectures that allow them to respond.
Alongside this massive increase in volume, velocity and variety has been the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). These nascent tools can provide a way to not only handle the data but to use it to help people make better decisions. Used wisely, these tools will allow NAB and other businesses to deliver better outcomes for customers through improved understanding and anticipating needs rather than being reactive.
As these tools are still in fairly early stages, NAB’s experimenting with them to see where they can be used to add value.
Greater access to more data presents challenges as well as opportunities. While protecting data has always been critical, how it’s done needs to change. Data protection, through better defences against cybersecurity threats, is crucial but it’s also important to ensure the right data governance processes and systems are in place.
One of the things NAB has done is assign data stewards in each business who are the guardians of data. They act to identify issues with data and resolve them.
Ethical data
AI and the burgeoning volume of data offers also present ethical considerations. The design of machine learning and AI models needs to go further than simple legal compliance. Just because you can legally and technically do something, doesn’t mean you ethically should.
NAB is creating an ethical practice model for the use of data that goes beyond simple rules about access control and specific use cases. For example, how can AI and data analytics be used to look for fraud? Where do we draw the line between privacy and identifying potentially illegal activity?
Moving along this path — to becoming a mature user of modern data management and analysis tools — involves creating a robust and secure data lake infrastructure in the cloud. In parallel, there needs to be a focus on not collecting all the available data but rather the high-quality, required data and guaranteeing the governance and management frameworks are in place to ensure information is used legally and ethically. This also requires creating and maintaining working relationships with regulators to ensure potential compliance issues are dealt with before they become significant.
As well as checking all the back-end systems can cope with the deluge of data and that streamlined systems aren’t allowed to regress to familiar, comfortable practices, there needs to be ongoing support and education for users so they’re equipped to work with real-time streamed data and not just structured reports.
There’s no doubt the world of data management and governance has become more complex. But with the right structures and tools, it’s possible take advantage of the new opportunities and deliver improvements right across a business.
If you’re interested in learning more and about working in technology at NAB, click here.
About the author: Glenda Crisp is NAB’s Executive General Manager, Enterprise Data, CDO. Prior to her role at NAB, Glenda held several senior positions at TD Bank Group and also worked for Accenture.
