Alex is a senior leader at an ambitious insurance brokerage. She has progressed through the firm as a highly successful broker, and is now responsible for a large team across several regions for her line of business.
Her planning meetings with her direct reports rely on spreadsheets. They provide an analysis of the business written in previous years; which agreements are likely to renew (and which aren't); and which types of business have been the most profitable.
This activity requires a lot of preparation. A few weeks before, the brokers get the MI team to produce a report of their business in the past twelve months. They then go through the report manually to make the necessary amendments, such as correcting some of the premium numbers; or adjusting the commission payments to take account of specific agreements that they made with the clients.
At an insurance conference, she gets chatting with a peer about the pain of preparing for the planning meetings.
I don't mind the planning so much, but all the fiddling around with the data does my head in!
Don't you have a Data Quality team to sort all that out for you?
We have a team, but they can't make the changes I need. They know nothing about broking. I don't really know what they get up to all day. Something about dashboards?
Then every so often we have a Data Governance committee.
That one's really fun.
We talk about all the data issues that we have, and how we haven't solved them.
We had a Data Governance project a while back, and it was really good - it got GDPR sorted out. I think that guy has left now.
Back in the office, Alex attends ExCo. Internal Audit have completed their review of the data function and are going through their recommendations.
The Head of IT agrees with the shortcomings around Data Quality and Data Governance but points out the lack of resource to focus on them.
The COO reminds the group that they used to have a Data Governance person but they couldn't get much traction with the business. The CEO suggests that they might be able to get someone better in this time.
To be continued...
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