Great Eastern is pouring investments into its data analytics capabilities as it seeks to enlarge the role of data in its corporate decision-making.
Last year, the Singapore-headquartered insurer created a centre of excellence to study and apply data analytics to the company’s operations.
“Over the last 18 months, we’ve built up a significant number of dashboards and their usage is quite high,” Ryan Cheong, managing director of digital for business at Great Eastern, told Computer Weekly.
According to Cheong, the company took a decentralised approach, in order to encourage more employees to incorporate data into their jobs. The centre is working on improving the company’s capabilities in data science, data governance and data engineering. The latter is especially important, as Great Eastern believes this is where it lacks the most, Cheong said.
The centre used to be under Cheong’s office, but now, the centre’s head reports directly to the CEO, reflecting the greater emphasis on the centre’s role.
Great Eastern has created a framework for data quality management and data governance, and the company is training more data stewards, which ensure compliance across the organisation. It also seeks to build a data-centric culture by encouraging employees to identify what they want to know, monitor and measure using data analytics before beginning the development process for a new digital product.
Cheong believes that data analytics will also play a larger role in Great Eastern’s relationships with its agents and customers.
“For the longest time, the relationships have been very linear,” Cheong said, “but we can certainly do more if we can be alongside an agent in a triangular relationship, where the agent is connected with the customer, who is also connected to Great Eastern.”
