Harnessing the power of data analytics at Great Eastern Singapore
How can we benefit from harnessing the power of data analytics to fuel decision making in our daily tasks?
The Group Data and Group Marketing teams at Great Eastern Singapore have recently embarked on a project to enable self-service analytics, empowering the marketing team to use data and AI more effectively in their business operations and decision making.
Bridging Data and Marketing: Empowering self-service analytics
In today’s data-driven world, the synergy between the Data and Marketing teams has become crucial for unlocking the full potential of business intelligence. A pivotal aspect of this collaboration is enabling the Marketing team to efficiently conduct data analysis and create dashboards by leveraging enterprise data platform, data foundation, and self-service tools. This transformation journey not only enhances efficiency but also fosters a culture of data-driven decision making within Great Eastern.
Beginning of the collaboration: Reliance on Group Data’s capabilities
The Group Marketing team generates and requires vast amounts of data for product portfolio analysis, customer insights, and campaign performance tracking. They used to rely heavily on the Group Data team to provide the necessary reports and insights. As the demand of Data and Analytics requests increases, Group Data and Group Marketing have taken a more agile and scalable approach to support strategy and decision making, enabling Group Marketing with self-service analytics capabilities to explore data, build dashboards, and conduct data analysis.
Evolution: Introducing self-serving capabilities
With Group Marketing establishing self-serve analytics capabilities, the collaboration with Group Data evolves towards more complex data needs, including building data foundations and incorporating more data points to enrich our data.
As the two teams align on the objectives, Group Data must grasp the specific needs of the Group Marketing team, this includes the types of data they use, the KPIs they track, and the reports they require. Similarly, Group Marketing needs to also understand the functions and limitations of the available data and tools.
The Group Data team plays a pivotal role in evaluating and selecting analytic tools that best fit the organisation’s data infrastructure. These include setting up data connections and data marts to ensure seamless integration with existing data sources such as product and campaign data, web analytic platforms and marketing assets. Group Data has helped design initial templates and dashboards serving as a starting point for Group Marketing, demonstrating best practices, and providing a framework for further customisation.
Group Marketing on the other hand has recruited the right talent and encouraging continuous professional development through training programs, workshops, and conferences to enhance the key users’ analytical skillsets.
Colin Chan, Managing Director, Group Marketing, Great Eastern, said: “Tapping the power of data analytics is just the beginning of an important and exciting journey for Group Marketing. We see its merits and are fully committed to moving in this direction which is why we have invested time, effort, and resources to establish this capability. Although it is still early days, we see a long road ahead with ample opportunities to evolve and improve. This initiative has strong management support, and we understand that it will take time to see the results of our joint efforts hence we need midterm checkpoints and milestones to keep track of progress.”
Becoming more agile: Improved efficiency and drive timely business decision making
Group Data has empowered Group Marketing with data analytics capabilities by enabling key users to have direct access to the big data platform with tools to self-serve. Ongoing support and collaboration with Group Data are crucial as the Group Marketing team embraces these tools and begins to explore more sophisticated analysis to better understand customers’ needs and preferences in supporting key leaders’ day-to-day business decision making.
With empowerment comes the need for robust data governance. Enterprise data governance framework and relevant guidelines and standards ensure the Group Marketing team is able to access and use data in a responsible way. The Group Marketing team put these guidelines into practice to maintain data integrity, including defining data definitions and metrics to avoid discrepancies and implementing data validation.
The empowerment of Group Marketing with self-service analytics brings numerous benefits:
· The team can effectively leverage data to drive insights leading to faster decision-making and making strategic product and marketing decisions.
· Improved collaboration between Group Data and Group Marketing leads to more strategic initiatives, driving overall business growth.
· The continuous push towards agile and scalable data analytics will allow Great Eastern to be nimbler to react to trends in order to maintain market leadership in the industry.
Adding to this, Zhao Jingyuan, Group Chief Data Officer at Great Eastern commented, “The success of Data and AI is not limited to just building modernised infrastructure and adopting AI technology but includes empowering business divisions across Great Eastern to leverage Data and AI in their day-to-day business operations and decision making. In the last two years, we have witnessed rapid growth of Group Marketing from consuming insights to generating insights to respond effectively to a dynamic market. This is the result of Group Marketing’s strategic hiring, culture change, and close collaboration under the leadership of Colin. Continuing in this direction, Group Data is committed to continuously build data-powered and AI-driven company.”
Conclusion
The collaboration between Group Data and Group Marketing to enable self-service analytics is a transformative journey and requires careful planning, robust training, and ongoing support. The objective of this approach is to create a more agile and data-driven organisation. By providing Group Marketing with the tools and knowledge to analyse data and create dashboards, the teams help Great Eastern to unlock new levels of insight and innovation.