Scaling to the Enterprise

This is not to say everything went smoothly. One department, while nominally supporting the effort, consistently failed to make key experts available for our analysis meetings. Rather than let them hold us back, we decided to focus our initial data marts on other parts of the business that were more enthusiastic.

Our first small data marts went live within months of the project’s initial launch and quickly began delivering easy to use, real-time, high-quality data to our business leaders and specialists. After that came further investment—beyond even what we had ever considered—as the early data warehouses uncovered new opportunities. For instance, our hospitality lending group was able to identify distinct types of hotel loans with differing performance histories, thus allowing the group to target new niches of opportunity.

Dan Smith, senior vice president of our North America Debt Group, was also an early supporter: "I could immediately see how the data warehouse was making my entire organization more productive and responsive and helping us to reach our aggressive growth goals."

However, what worked for two or three small data marts wouldn’t scale to a large, complex data warehouse. To build for the future, we began migrating from a Microsoft server to a Unix environment complete with Oracle databases. We used Informatica for back-end data extraction, transformation and loading, and Cognos reporting tools.

A Moment of Triumph

Thus far, we have invested approximately $5.9 million in our data warehouse, and the ROI is encouraging. The data warehouse is saving GE Real Estate more than $2.5 million a year in direct labor costs by providing quick and easy access to data that previously required extensive research. The intangible benefits are harder to quantify, though significant: They include the ability to respond faster and more decisively to business opportunities, improved risk and property management, and a better command of market issues.

But for the business sponsors who invest in IT projects such as this one, some benefits are truly priceless. Not long after the launch, Jayne Day, our senior vice president of global risk management, was on her way to a quarterly meeting with corporate headquarters executives when she heard a news bulletin that a blue-chip company—and major tenant—was falling on hard times. While still en route to the meeting, she keyed in to the data warehouse to assess our real estate exposure. Less than an hour after the first news report, when a senior executive at the meeting asked how it might affect us, Jayne had the numbers right at her fingertips. What’s more, she could report on the instructions she had already given to the affected property managers in Dallas and Manchester, United Kingdom.