Many companies treat their data warehouse “like a dumping ground”, says Chris Nottage, enterprise architect at Lloyds TSB.

But getting the message about the importance of data through to the company as a whole – and then understanding what data is important – “can take a long time”.

“If you miss the dog’s birthday, it will still be your best friend, but if you miss your wedding anniversary, you’ll only have the dog left for company,” Nottage observes.

“Something like four terabytes of data profiling cash transactions and money laundering – that’s very important [to Lloyds TSB],” he explains. At some companies, it can even keep the CEO out of jail.

In contrast, “A lot of data is simply operational data – day-to-day reporting that doesn’t need to go into the warehouse. After a time, it can go.”

Standardised processes

"Business intelligence tools can help standardise processes around establishing data prioritisation, and that reinforces the notion that “information is key, not data”, Nottage argues.

Beyond the quality of data, the spread of it must also be carefully managed. That may not have been so much of an issue “in the early days of the computer centre, when it was locked down and treated like a temple”, but it is critical now that information is moving to other departments, outside partners
“You can click a link on Amazon and be taken through to a third-party affiliate,” Nottage says by way of example. As a result, the “shape of information has changed”, he argues.

“BI means a lot of different things to different people. Software tools can help you understand the flow of data – the potential benefits are enormous – but it takes time to get there.”

Echoing the concerns of many others in the IT and business world, Nottage admits that, when it comes to implementation, “IT [generally] takes the lead, but it can be a problem.”

“[A BI tool] has to be a joint effort with business, with IT enabling business objectives,” he says. “A lot of BI projects fail because people haven’t stepped back and seen the overall business vision of what the project is trying to achieve.”

He warns that BI can be a hard sell to business. “The ROI is not visible directly – accountants will often question the value of it in the short term.” And that might be influenced by the fact that BI is shooting at a moving target: BI projects can involve “significant risk, as the business keeps moving” through the development and implementation. “You can’t stop the business for 10 weeks while you change the system,” he says.

Nottage says Lloyds TSB is currently trying to consolidate its tools down to a manageable number, which is proving “a challenge in terms of data integration”. The bank is also looking at a process-centric SOA strategy in the long term that will allow things like working with customer information

to target profitable customers, and to gauge the level of service offered to them dependent on that.

“A lot of information needed by business is hidden in data,” he says. “But there’s a natural inertia to change, and a lot of investment [is needed] to get where we want to go.”

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