Absa Bank is well on its way to achieving information management excellence. Dave Donkin, Group Executive: Information Management at Absa, described Absa's journey to date, at the SAS Forum International in Geneva earlier this year, which started in 2001 with the goals of enabling information and knowledge-based strategy formulation and decision-making, and leveraging information to improve business performance.
Donkin quotes Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad, who said: "In too many companies there is a grand, and overly vague, long-term goal on one hand... and detailed short-term budgets and annual plans on the other hand... with nothing to link the two together." Absa set about building the bridge between strategic objectives and the here-and-now management issues by implementing waves of change.
The first wave was to build an enterprise-wide data warehouse, followed by a wave of building customer insight. Data mining and predictive modelling, assessment of customer lifetime value, segmentation analysis, propensity modelling, ad hoc lead generation and cross-selling, and profitability analysis all came into play.
The third wave was architecting the enterprise information infrastructure for alignment. Like many organisations, information silos had developed over time. An enterprise-wide approach led to the development of an enterprise information architecture, with a single point of truth, and an over-arching framework of corporate governance. An increasing number of application areas had to be supported, among them business intelligence, compliance, marketing, customer analytics and operational analytics.
The next wave was the balanced scorecard driven by business strategy. Internal sponsorship and generating ownership were key, along with top-down alignment. This wave was characterised by prototyping and then prototyping again, until it was right. "You get what you measure," says Donkin, "so you have to be careful and thorough in setting up your measurement systems!"
The fifth wave was the automation and enhancement of the analytics. Donkin explains: "You can only optimise the power of analytics by focusing on the entire value chain. We extended our data analytics capability to ramp up the value from the underlying information on cross-selling and retention."
This involved working from structured business requirements with automated analytics, overlaying a multitude of complex models, often enhanced via Geo-spatial information systems (GIS). Measurement is key, with aligned targets and the ongoing selling of the possibilities to business units.
In the latest wave, Holistic BI, Absa has expanded its scope into the realm of what it terms Business Insight, harnessing the insight from a multitude of information sources. Absa estimates 20% of the information it uses is internal from structured databases whilst 80% is external, of an unstructured nature. A holistic approach to BI requires attention across the entire value chain. The major challenges are creating ownership, changing behaviour, and ensuring good governance at every step. Leadership needs to be sold the benefits: perceptions drive attitudes, attitudes drive behaviour, behaviour drives results.
Absa believe that the efforts it has put into information management are not only worthwhile, but essential. Donkin concludes: "In an increasingly virtual world of financial services, whoever best uses information to drive strategy and action, will win!"
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