What Is the Ultimate Destination of a Data Journey?

After creating a data vision, member-centric data strategy and data maturity roadmap – and increasing data consumption by talent – what is left on your journey of leveraging data to improve members’ lives?

The final destination in the data journey is establishing continuous data capability. This is the credit union’s ability to leverage data as it builds its data-centric enterprise strength.

To effectively do this, a credit union needs to create a Center of Excellence, receive continued support from leadership and adopt an enterprise member-centric data mindset.

Center of Excellence

Centers of Excellence (CoE) formally bring together organizational strengths to build a competency – in this case, member excellence. A CoE is supplemental to standalone business units. It functions as a separate, corporate unit housing critical expertise on smart, connected products. It does not hold profit-and-loss responsibility – it is a shared services cost center that other business units can tap.

A CoE is composed of a (typically small) team of dedicated experts managed from a common central point. The CoE is the team leading the exploration and adoption of new tools, techniques or practices. Meeting cadence/time varies, but is often quick and action-oriented.

The CoE brings together cross-functional expertise in digital technologies (such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things) and transformation strategy, guiding IoT product strategy and providing expert resources.

For credit union leaders, who love their members, creating a Member Center of Excellence (MCoE) is a natural fit.

The benefits of creating a MCoE are powerful and impactful. It can:

1. Act as a new organizational approach to prioritize and facilitate successful delivery of member experience initiatives;

2. Prioritize member needs across individual teams and provide a consistent member experience across the value chain;

3. Leverage knowledge cross-functionally; and

4. Effectively deliver resources across the credit union to efficiently and effectively deliver member value.

Creating a MCoE

For data transformation success, building a CoE that is member-focused is essential.

To establish a MCoE, the organization should have identified a capability that it is looking to build. The following four steps provide the framework for standing up the MCoE:

1. Determine the internal support/readiness level. Determine the best timing for the implementation of a MCoE. The best practice is to align with short-term goals and realistic execution of the member story.

2. Formulate a strategy vision and game plan. Leadership should determine the scope and benefits of the MCoE. This should include identifying the corporate sponsor with cross-organizational influence and establishing essential stakeholder adoption.

3. Determine the team’s skills and expertise. Determining who will be members of the MCoE team starts with aligning the member story’s specific initiatives with the subject matter expertise needed. The team should also include people in cross-functional roles with authority to implement decisions made by CoE. Evaluate the team members based on the skill sets required in the MCoE and ensure roles are filled appropriately.

4. Create the project charter and operational structure. To complete the MCoE project charter, leadership needs to create a set of preferred metrics, establish a design-thinking and spring-planning metric for each initiative, and define the reporting cadence of measurement metrics. Finally, leadership needs to determine the frequency of meetings, as well as goals, agendas and tasks to accomplish at each meeting.

Leadership Support

A credit union’s leadership must recognize that data centricity is a rinse-and-repeat function, not a one and done. Staying focused on the impact data has on members’ lives is an excellent anchor point for the enterprise as it will provide clarity in its communication and strategy.

To leverage data across an organization, the organization must make the following commitments:

1. Designate a leader;

2. Measure accountability;

3. Incorporate a strategic practice;

4. Maintain regular communication with stakeholders; and

5. Invest in building a data culture with continuous learning.

Creating a Member-Centric Data Enterprise Mindset

The success of any data initiative depends on how well the use of data becomes infused into the enterprise’s DNA. The credit union’s DNA is the operating system of the credit union’s “hug.” This hug is the combination of the credit union’s heart, mission and passion of its talent to “always do right by the member.” The credit union’s “head” is its data and how it is transformed into insights to make members’ lives better.

The challenge with the credit union hug is that the head component is often overlooked because there is a common misinterpretation that the data consumption is an organic capability. Data consumption can be organic for some, but for an entire organization to move into a data-centric mindset, this capability must be formally created.

Building a data culture is essential and requires a defined process to be successful. An effective data culture is one in which everyone in the organization leverages data in their decision-making processes. Talent uses it, understands that data has potential and limits, and sees data and data analytics as a positive experience rather than an obstacle. Building a data culture takes leadership and training as well as buy-in from talent. Everyone needs to buy into building a data culture and understand how and why it will make their lives easier. The benefits of a healthy, member-centric data mindset include the ability to:

• Create a distinctive member experience that is powered by technology and obsessively member-focused;
• Leverage the power of cross-functional teams that generate high-speed innovation, resulting in a strong pipeline of new products to meet member needs; and
• Build a robust data consumption capability to propel the credit union to scale fast, and efficiently stay competitive in the future.

Workplace adoption is quite possibly the ultimate destination for data transformation. When an organization has the vision, strategy and resources to achieve its data transformation goals, then, by default of transformation, it creates new capabilities and, ideally, a new culture.

Workplace adoption is not an organic development. Successful organizations practice diligently to propel new capabilities and culture to continue the trajectory that the data transformation plan ignited.

Anne Legg is the Founder of THRIVE Strategic Services, a San Diego, Calif.-based company that assists credit unions with data transformation, and author of “Big Data/Big Climb,” a credit union playbook for data transformation.