Data mastery key to reducing costs

Obtaining better intelligence from corporate data will be essential to reducing costs, determining areas for automation and surviving in an environment in which regulation is imperative, according to a Celent report, Data Mastery Strategies. “Data mastery” is the ability to extract useful business information from raw data. It involves bringing relevant data from different sources into a single file so that it can be accessed by an application or an analytic program, according to the report. It covers a broad range of technology solutions, including data warehouses, data marts, CRM, unified presentation layers and business intelligence. Data mastery projects in the insurance industry primarily involve seven areas: customer data (including interaction history), sales and marketing initiatives, claims analysis, fraud detection, finance and operations, profitability and actuarial. The main stages of planning and executing data mastery projects, according to Celent, are:• define the business problem; • secure participation from business users; • choose the technology solution; • identify, clean, and map the core data sources; • implement data exchange; • test the system; • train the business users; and • maintain and expand the system to meet new business needs. “The most direct return on investment from data mastery projects comes from improved productivity of knowledge workers and improved quality and speed of analyses by business analysts and strategists,” according to the report. “But the true return comes from better business results achieved as a consequence of better analysis.”