How Can Cloud-Shy Organizations Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic? Answer is Slalom’s Modern Culture of Data
COVID-19, which started in the Wuhan Province in China as a single event is now a global pandemic. Daily life as we all knew it came to a screeching halt as governments mandated stay-at-home orders in March; schools were shut down and non-essential workplaces followed suit. The S&P 500 fell 34% from its all-time closing high on February 19 to its March 23 low, attributable to the rising fears resulting from the uncertainty we were operating within.
Since then, we have witnessed how people have adapted to the new normal, realizing that life is never going to be the same. Many companies have been forced to rethink their business models and adapt. With no physical proximity allowed, organizations have had to rethink how to continue to engage their customers and deliver their goods and services.
For many, this has meant evolving their digital maturity and becoming cloud-savvy overnight to survive. Meanwhile, others like Amazon, Chipotle, and Shopify have not only survived but flourished because they were already digitally mature and able to harness the power of the cloud and big data to offer personalized products and services to their customers.
Digitally shy healthcare providers scrambled to offer telemedicine to their patients by limiting patient displacement to hospitals, allocating hospital capacity to severe cases, while limiting the disease’s spread. Before COVID-19, a study showed that in the U.S. alone, 82 percent of consumers did not use telemedicine. My kids’ doctor was charging $145 for a remote checkup while WebMd charges only $30 for remote consultation. WebMd has been providing remote consultation for several years.
Until recently, many organizations have been hesitant to put data in the cloud. Security has been a major barrier to cloud adoption in many verticals, but it’s especially critical in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and financial services. As cloud computing went mainstream, healthcare providers cited regulatory requirements for HIPAA and HITECH and data security to limit their investment in cloud technologies. In reality, they were driven by fear of change and exposing their inefficient processes. Their cloud adoption could amount to using only specific SaaS applications offered by longstanding on-premises electronic health record (EHR) providers. When researchers asked 220 healthcare IT decision-makers and influencers about their organizations’ technology plans, only 11% were considered early adopters, with another 25% making some headway in their digital health plans. Similarly, financial services companies are behind others in deploying cloud as a central part of IT operations, with around 70% saying their cloud projects are only at the initial, or trial and testing stage. One of the large US not-for-profit banks has been very hesitant to move to the cloud due to concerns about possible security breaches that could cause havoc on their member’s experience. At the same time, they experienced several network outages and remote access challenges for their employees to their critical on-premise systems during the forced quarantine at home. Member services were impacted by these outages. Their hesitancy to move to the cloud directly resulted in these challenges.
We have learned during this worldwide crisis that uncertainty and change are dominant factors in life. Adaptability is the new superpower. Consumers expect organizations to show their commitment to keeping them healthy. Safety and health have never been more important than now for almost all organizations across all sectors. Organizations are forced to make key decisions at a speed never experienced before. One European bank acted on 104 key decisions including the migration of tens of thousands of employees to remote settings and the disbursement of new stimulus program funds in a single week. This would normally have required four months or more planning, yet no errors were found post-audit.
To truly understand and adapt to the rapidly changing world at scale, organizations need access to real-time data and insights. Precise insights are the foundation of adaptation and how organizations can respond to changes in the most effective way. In most companies, including those slow to adapt to cloud technologies such as many healthcare and financial services organizations, customer data resides in silos across multiple applications and databases. This poses a huge roadblock to knowing their customers (patients for healthcare providers) and adjusting to fast-changing customers behaviors and preferences. Where possible, more patients are opting for remote consultations with their doctors, but healthcare organizations are not able to provide affordable remote consultations due to lack of digitization and data platforms to share data with patients.
Modern Culture of Data
At Slalom, we understand the dilemmas organizations go through when they decide whether to migrate to the cloud. At the same time, we see the impact of data that is clean and available to the decision-makers who need it, when they need it. Organizations do not have a dearth of data. In fact, they are flooded with data, but there must be an environment and culture of experimentation, empowerment, curiosity, critical thinking, and collaboration that allows companies to truly become data-driven. This requires a shift in how companies work. This is why Slalom has developed a transformation framework called the Modern Culture of Data.
Modern Culture of Data (MCOD) is empowered and enabled by five elements. It calls for businesses to be truly data-driven by having a bold vision (chart a unified vision and strategy). Organizations need to provide data access and transparency (by building integrated, flexible and scalable data platforms) and establish data guardianship so employees can easily access trusted data. It also emphasizes on improving data literacy within employees so they can develop the mindset and skillset that drive action with the data and tools. Lastly, MCOD recognizes that defining ways of working (an operating model to support the vision) is key to an organization achieving truly a fundamental shift in culture. At Slalom, we have been helping many healthcare and financial services organizations to achieve their goals using MCOD.
Helping Healthcare Organizations
The COVID-19 crisis has suddenly pushed healthcare organizations to the limelight and for good reason. Every day, leaders at these organizations are asked to make decisions based on the COVID-19 data in almost real-time. These organizations need access to transparent data platforms that break down data silos and make data available to everyone in the organization, allowing business operations and users to be agile and nimble in reaching insights required to adapt and operate during this crisis.
A health system COO in Seattle urgently needed a way to track metrics on patients, beds, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (PPE). Every hour was vital. So, Slalom put together a simple dashboard that immediately gave leadership a clear picture of a complex situation and required no training to adopt. Microsoft later launched a new emergency response app for the healthcare system based on this dashboard.
A northwest regional healthcare provider with over 50 hospitals, 1,000 clinics, and 5 million unique patients called on the Slalom Data and Analytics team with a single ask: Help us visualize our acute care response and our telemedicine network and get us a top-level picture of where demand is. The Slalom team built a set of Power BI dashboards using data from a scalable, flexible, and high-performance data warehouse built using Snowflake. This helped the client track telemedicine statistics, acute care metrics, and home monitoring of COVID-19 patients, along with an executive summary dashboard that ties the three together. The data captured and reported in the dashboards have the potential to be the basis of the provider’s virtual care response model and has helped to shape decisions about how a telemedicine network is funded.
In both above cases, the organizations had a bold vision to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and provide their patients with the best care that they could. Slalom helped build a transparent data platform that was user friendly and provided all users within the organization with easy access to the data and insights they needed, when and how they needed it. The insights from these dashboards were embedded in their new ways of working.
A Modern Culture of Data is all about having data at the forefront of decision making for organizations, making data part of their DNA. More and more healthcare companies are adopting machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to find answers to challenges like COVID-19. Cloud platforms like Azure, Google and AWS are making it easy for AI/ML practitioners to build and deploy AI/ML models. Artificial intelligence could play a significant role in stopping the COVID-19 pandemic. MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab is funding 10 projects at MIT targeting public health and economic challenges during this COVID-19 crisis.
A few interesting ones are:
i) early detection of sepsis in COVID-19 patients,
ii) designing proteins to block SARS-CoV-2,
iii) which materials make the best face masks?
iv) treating COVID-19 with repurposed drugs,
v) leveraging electronic medical records to find a treatment for COVID-19
vi) overcoming manufacturing and supply hurdles to provide global access to a COVID-19 vaccine etc.
Helping Financial Services Organizations
Similarly, in the financial services industry, fintech companies use the cloud as their main platform and build services and products (often using AI/ML) that are revolutionizing the banking and finance industry. These companies already have a modern culture of data with data and insights embedded within each of their processes, products and services.
Customers have questions such as:
“Where is my money?”
“Should I be worried about my retirement?”
“What are the safest investment choices?”
“Can I re-finance or get a new loan?”
If these organizations use clean, trusted data in real-time built on transparent platforms and provide answers to these questions, they reduce their customers’ stress. When they do, they start to build loyalty and trust.
Slalom is working with the not-for-profit bank mentioned earlier to build their next-generation modern data warehouse platform on the Snowflake cloud. This will allow them to get more real-time data and integrate more data, including external data. This will also enable a faster path to analytics and build more holistic customer profiles, including credit/financial profile to assist with loan decisions. Additionally, this will allow for experimentation, helping them to explore the impact of COVID-19 on their members’ finances (potential defaults), categorize members into tapestry segments, geo-tagging of member’s transactions to understand COVID-19 impact and so on; things that were not possible with their current platform. Slalom is also working on implementing data quality measures to improve the business’s trust in data, along with a Power BI reporting tool to implement self-service analytics.
Recently, Slalom worked with a large financial services company to solve their challenge in creating innovative data products due to siloed data assets across the organization. To overcome this challenge, Slalom partnered with AWS to build a Data Marketplace. Slalom helped the client determine the best architecture, communication strategy and operating model, thus creating transparency, providing access to data and implementing the right ways of working with data to drive a thriving data culture. This approach helped to reduce the time to market with their new products and offerings.
The unprecedented nature of COVID-19 has resulted in a rapidly changing credit market as lending providers and governments alter policy to accommodate the economic impact of borrowers nationwide. Existing risk models lack the flexibility or granularity to adapt to the crisis, preventing banks from identifying crucial trends and insights that highlight how new borrowing behavior and policies impact their business. Slalom has built a suite of real-time reporting mechanisms built on AWS and Tableau, which allow firms to manage risk on the fly so that they can shift strategy and anticipate the economic impact of the pandemic as it unfolds. Slalom has enabled immediate information sharing and innovative ways of working with data to analyze trends in buy/sell movements throughout their funds.
Industries like healthcare and financial services are forced to modernize and operate on the cloud quickly due to the implications of COVID-19. While moving to the cloud is a good thing, modernization efforts need to be evaluated to understand their impact on internal processes and users, and at the same time, their customers. When the new normal settles in, will the modernization capabilities allow the healthcare and financial services organizations to tap into a new set of customers, create new products and services to cater to the changing customer preferences, or set up new digital processes? Slalom’s Modern Culture of Data framework will allow these organizations to evaluate what is required to continue their innovation past the virus. Its five pillars (bold vision, access and transparency, Guardianship, Data Literacy and Ways of working) are designed to drive the shift in culture. Successfully shifting the culture will not only help to adapt to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis but will also help to drive efficiencies, new revenue opportunities, innovation, while empowering employees.
How can we help?
While each scenario discussed above is particularly relevant today, we have been discussing these needs with customers before COVID-19, and we will continue to do so once the pandemic is behind us.
Has COVID-19 forced you to identify an urgent need to work within the existing technology and data infrastructure within your organization? Are you anticipating a need to be better prepared for the ‘new normal’?
Drop us a line and we’d be happy to chat.
This is the third post in our Modern Culture of Data COVID-19 series. If you missed the first post by Oliver Asmus, check it out here. Amanda Lintelman’ post about overcoming the constraints imposed by legacy technology and cumbersome data infrastructure to survive COVID-19 is the second in series. There will be four posts in this series; be sure to check them all out and reach out to learn more.
