1.1 Why We Need a Data and Reporting Strategy
In BMT we see a rapidly changing landscape of risks, opportunities and constraints around data. Whether this is the data we use to make decisions every day to how we support our customers or our employees. Our Business Strategy and our Business Risks build a picture that shows how volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous this world is.
But also what is possible today is evolving quickly.
- As our systems become more integrated globally our ability to provide timely and descriptive analytics to users will increase hugely.
- By having more targeted reports we can provide more context to help individuals undertake their own diagnostic analytics to understand why things happened.
- With simple models applied to our global datasets we can deliver predictive analytics to help provide early insight into opportunities and risks.
- And combining these models and datasets with automation tools we can start to help individuals find out what they could do next with prescriptive analytics.
1.2 The Three Data Landscape Layers
To help us de-mystify the data analytics landscape, we will outline the three ‘layers’ of data:
‘transactional’ data (generated in the normal course of interactions with users),
‘operational’ data (needed to run and optimise the organisation) and
‘strategic’ data – (the insights and analysis needed to enable the business strategy to be informed, developed and implemented).
A fourth element should also consider the application of AI or machine learning to help understand one or more of the data landscape layers. A useful Insights paper on this model can be found here.
1.3 Our Data-Driven Vision for BMT
The volatility and uncertainty present both challenges and opportunities for our customers and ourselves, with data-driven insights offering substantial potential. We acknowledge the value that data brings to all parts of BMT, and our company-wide vision initially focuses on the customers-to-cash value chain and growing the business through strategic insights about our customers, markets, employees and business.
To achieve our goal of doubling revenue to become a £500M business in the next five years, we will:
- Assure our Transactional Data by building trust through appropriate Data Governance and developing the skills of our people.
- Deliver the Data & Analytics Capability (people and data warehouse) to support GMIS and other Business Systems.
- Develop our Operational Data by tracking and monitoring project data to improve delivery and profitability of our customer projects.
- Collect, analyse, and act on customer feedback to enhance the customer experience.
- Collect, analyse, and act on internal lessons learned from projects and audits to improve overall business delivery.
- Manage customer insights to target the right markets and opportunities.
By focusing on these areas, we anticipate significant growth in orders and profit margins, ultimately achieving our ambitious revenue target.
1.4 The Reporting Strategy
This Reporting Strategy outlines our approach to getting the most out of our data by setting out clear standards and a consistent approach for BMT.
We have a content management and deployment model which enables report writers and data owners to use a methodical and disciplined lifecycle management approach to reduce errors, minimise inconsistencies and improve the user experience for data consumers.
In our model we recognise that we have many data consumers but a relatively small team of report writers. The core team of report writers and technical support are centralised and shared across functions and the global business.
The following diagram Figure 1.4 depicts the high-level overview of the components used in our reporting strategy; this will be expanded upon in later sections. The primary focus is on providing an organisation-wide content distribution at scale alongside in-system reporting within certain applications such as IFS Cloud Lobbies.
