How Bupa is taking charge of its data

Bupa Australia and New Zealand is aiming to improve its data governance in a multi-year project that will enable the healthcare provider to understand the ‘complete lineage’ of information across the organisation.

Speaking at the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit 2020 in Sydney, Bupa head of data strategy Darshil Mehta, said the company has chosen ASG Technologies’ data intelligence tool to provide a complete data landscape.

“It’s not easy the journey we went through because, you have to do step-by-step and in phases. But now with the outcome, we are extremely happy the way we are seeing the data. And this is not done yet…we have just started this journey,” Mehta said.

The tool helps teams understand the logic behind transforming data, he said.

“You do want to make sure that it’s the right logic. Then you also want to report that into more business friendly language to your business stakeholders that this is how we calculate premiums, this is how we calculate policies, and this is the logic embedded in here.”

Bupa implemented a couple of successful use cases in Q4 2019 and will be rolling out to more data environments in 2020.

For enterprises wishing to tackle their data governance issues, Mehta advises three things: find the problems to be solved, get the foundations right, and find the right tool for your data governance issues.

Between 2013 and 2014, Mehta worked at GE Capital where he implemented successful data governance projects. A big lesson from this experience, he says, is that if you don’t use the right tool, “everything becomes manual despite your best efforts.”

Mehta said that in a traditional product life cycle, there are business analysts, solution analysts, solution designers, developers, testers, and business analysts doing requirement analysis.

He says that depending on how complex the data project can be they spend so much time in just figuring out where what data is sitting, and who is using it.

“This sort of tool eliminates this time, if not it ultimately reduces that time drastically.”

The tool also helps Bupa with compliance as it helps to figure out how data is managed, and how and where it is being used, he said.