Data analytics is a culture, not a tool
Cloud-based data analytics have allowed one bank to fast-forward its efforts to better understand customer behaviour, completing what used to be a five-day process in “seconds or minutes”, a senior marketing executive has revealed.
Speaking during a panel session at the ACS Reimagination Thought Leaders’ Summit, Head of Institutional Marketing at ANZ Trisca Scott-Branagan said increasingly digital-reliant customers were driving the bank’s sea change towards a data-driven culture.
Customers “are not just doing [digital] at the initial stages of their investigations, but are doing it throughout their lifecycle,” she said, flagging an ensuing data-driven journey that had reinforced the value of consumer insight and data-driven marketing.
“What is engaging marketing is serving up content that is relevant to [customers] at the time they need it,” Scott-Branagan said.
“Data gives us enormous power to look at people’s behaviours, and the level of engagement that we have with them – and to use that to inform further decisions.”
ANZ’s data-driven renaissance – effected through a 2018 partnership with Google to leverage its cloud-based analytics capabilities – came as increasing automation spared the need for aggregated, deidentified data sets to be analysed manually.
This helped it make faster decisions around strategic issues like liquidity, risk and cash management as well as the location of its branches and market positioning.
Gartner has advised businesses to formalise recognition of key technology trends – such as augmented analytics, continuous intelligence, augmented data management and building data fabrics – and prioritise those with the most potential impact.
Yet investing in data isn’t just about a change in mindset: as organisations pivot towards the greater and broader organisational use of data, Vertiv’s Australian Director for Datacentre Solutions Kirk Wetherell said, they also need the IT and critical infrastructure “designed to make sure it doesn’t fail and put this all at risk”.
Many cloud-hungry organisations had dialled back their enthusiasm in recent years as the realities of building data-driven organisations bit hard, he said – and a hybrid infrastructure approach was the best compromise.
“Even if you try to put everything in the cloud, you still have to connect to it,” he said. “The hybrid approach is where you put the data and the IT loads where it makes the most sense.”
Making the most out of analytics meant “trying to get the entire organisation to be a bit more data-minded,” said Dayle Stevens, Chief Data Officer with AGL.
