Case study: Data quality project helps Marks & Spencer Money with compliance
By Steve Ranger
Published: 9 August 2006 15:15 BST
Marks & Spencer Money has completed a data quality project that has helped it comply with Basel II regulations well ahead of the January 2007 deadline.
The company - part of HSBC - offers financial products including the credit cards and insurance policies.
As well as complying with the Basel II Capital Accord - which requires the tracking and reporting of ongoing exposure to credit, market and operational risks - M&S Money wanted to improve customer data accuracy which would then improve the quality of business intelligence data.
Neil Hershaw, information management officer at M&S Money, explained: "Basel II was the final piece in the jigsaw when looking to justify a data quality project. For Basel II compliance we had to put a lot of effort into processes people and technology."
The increasing amount of customer data stored had made the quality of that data more of an issue, he told silicon.com. "Fifteen years ago people didn't have much data about customers and it was in their operational systems. Now we've got many terabytes of information in huge data warehouses. But if that data is wrong it doesn't matter how good your model is, the results will be skewed."
M&S Money chose Informatica's PowerCenter data integration package, using the Data Quality and Data Profiler modules to check the quality of data going into and coming out of its Oracle datawarehouse to make sure the business intelligence data remained accurate.
The same packages were used to assure the sustained accuracy of data derived from third party feeds, such as those from insurance policy providers.
silicon.com Retail & Leisure
Get the latest retail and leisure news straight to your inbox. Sign up for the R&L newsletter today!
The project began with defining data quality rules for the relevant files and tables, then coding those rules, running the data, then analysing the data and creating a plan for improving quality assurance.
Hershaw said there isn't a one-time fix for data quality - levels are checked formally on a quarterly basis.
He said: "Data quality is a cumulative thing. It's not a project - data quality is an ongoing thing you have to have in every organisation. People have to see it as something they have embedded in the organisation."
And it's not all a technology problem, he pointed out: "It's not always an IT fix it might be a training fix or a process fix - it doesn't have to be rocket science to fix some of these issues."
Ovum analyst Ian Charlesworth said data quality is an issue many companies are looking to address, and are using regulatory compliance projects as a hook to hang such programmes on.
He said: "What's happening is those hooks are becoming more easily identifiable - whether it's a compliance project - it's becoming easier to explain to the business why data quality is important."
These responsibilities will be as follows:- Data extraction- Data extraction from multiple database types using different extraction methodologies- ...
Post holder must comply with the current Security Policy, Acceptable Computer Usage Policy which will be made available by the Security / HR ...
My client is on the lookout for a Business Intelligence /Applications Development Team Lead to join their team in Dublin 1.Description Be a part of ...
Agenda Setters 2008
Welcome to the ninth annual Agenda Setters poll – silicon.com's list of the top 50 most influential individuals in the technology and IT industries, from techies and CIOs to entrepreneurs and business leaders. Find out more in our latest special report.
Stories from the web...
Copyright © 2008 CBS Interactive Limited. All rights reserved. Top of page
Nick Heath
David Lister on smart grids and why he left RBS
Interview: National Grid CIO
Andy Jones
Why banks will push ahead with offshoring
Comment: Even if they don't want to
Catherine Stagg-Macey
Legacy IT holding back insurers
Comment: Economic crisis means finance giants must step lively
Julian Goldsmith
The City fund manager with no IT department
Q&A: How asset management is embracing the cloud...
Peter Cochrane
Peter Cochrane's Blog: How tech can solve the banking crisis
Bring on a machine-based economy
Peter Fawcett
How financial turmoil will shape outsourcing
Comment: Deals on hold and all eyes on cost