Contextual Challenges
BMT operates within a dynamic environment where reliable, accessible data is essential for informed decision-making. However, several common challenges currently hinder our data operations:
Data Centralisation and Access
- Challenge: BMT’s data is dispersed across multiple departments, systems, and sources, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies in data access. Employees often face difficulties locating and retrieving accurate data when needed.
- Impact: This decentralisation causes delays in decision-making, makes cross-departmental insights harder to achieve, and fosters a lack of data transparency across the organisation.
Data Quality and Consistency
- Challenge: Ensuring data quality is challenging due to varied data standards and the lack of a unified data governance framework. Issues like incomplete records, outdated information, and discrepancies in data entry across departments compromise data integrity.
- Impact: Poor data quality leads to unreliable insights, undermining confidence in data-driven decision-making and affecting customer-facing outputs and operational efficiency.
Departmental Data Silos
- Challenge: BMT’s departments often maintain separate data repositories, resulting in data silos. These silos obstruct the seamless flow of information and hinder collaborative insights, as data is only partially available across teams.
- Impact: Data silos create duplicate data efforts, increase operational costs, and inhibit a unified understanding of customer needs and project progress, ultimately limiting BMT’s agility and innovation.
Security and Compliance Pressures
- Challenge: With the growing regulatory landscape around data privacy and protection, ensuring data security across various systems and access points is increasingly complex. Compliance requires stringent governance but is difficult to enforce across disparate systems.
- Impact: Security vulnerabilities and non-compliance risks expose BMT to potential reputational damage and regulatory fines, compromising trust with stakeholders and customers.
Opportunities
The Data Operating Model (DOM) presents a strategic response to these challenges, transforming them into opportunities that align with BMT’s digital vision and business objectives:
Centralised Data Access for Unified Insights
- Opportunity: By centralising data into a single access point, the DOM facilitates consistent, transparent data access across departments. This centralisation provides a “single source of truth,” enabling departments to collaborate using unified insights, which improves cross-functional decision-making.
- Solution in the DOM: Through a cloud-based infrastructure and medallion architecture, the DOM consolidates data, reducing inefficiencies and enhancing the accuracy of insights.
Enhanced Data Quality and Governance
- Opportunity: Standardising data governance across BMT improves data quality and fosters a data-driven culture. Implementing consistent quality checks and governance protocols ensures that high-quality data is available across the organisation, building trust in data as a strategic asset.
- Solution in the DOM: The DOM’s data quality protocols in the Silver and Gold layers ensure data is consistently validated, cleansed, and aligned with BMT’s common data model. Data stewardship roles support ongoing quality checks, ensuring data integrity.
Breaking Down Data Silos for Greater Collaboration
- Opportunity: By dismantling data silos, the DOM enables smoother collaboration and empowers employees with a holistic view of business data. Unified data access allows for faster, more accurate decision-making, fostering an agile organisational culture that is responsive to new opportunities and customer demands.
- Solution in the DOM: The centralised data infrastructure integrates disparate data sources and ensures data is accessible to all authorised teams. This accessibility encourages collaboration and consistency in data handling, supporting both strategic and operational goals.
Strengthened Security and Compliance
- Opportunity: Implementing a unified security and compliance framework through the DOM mitigates risks and ensures BMT remains compliant with data privacy regulations. This security structure builds customer and stakeholder confidence, establishing BMT as a trusted data custodian.
- Solution in the DOM: The DOM enforces security protocols, including role-based access and regular audits, at each layer of the data lifecycle. These practices ensure compliance while maintaining flexible data access, aligning with BMT’s strategic commitment to security and trust.
Optimising Operational Efficiency and Reducing Costs
- Opportunity: By addressing data redundancy, standardising data access, and streamlining operations, the DOM supports BMT’s drive for operational efficiency. A centralised data approach reduces resource allocation to data management, allowing for a more strategic focus on innovation and value-driven activities.
- Solution in the DOM: Through automated workflows and cloud-based infrastructure, the DOM reduces the manual burden of data handling and lowers IT overheads. This efficiency frees resources, enabling teams to concentrate on enhancing customer experiences and driving innovation.