From data silos to actionable insights: Innovating within legacy constraints for the digital enterprise
Market View
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Interview with
Kate Jones
HEAD OF DATA PRODUCT & STRATEGY
COVENTRY BUILDING SOCIETY
about
Kate
Jones
Kate Jones is Head of Data Product & Strategy at Coventry Building Society, a role she has held since September 2023. An accomplished data leader with an MBA and Chartered Manager status (CMgr MCMI), Kate has received numerous accolades including a DataIQ award for best Data Academy and recognition as both a DataIQ Future Leader and Orbition Group Rising Star in data & analytics in 2024. She brings extensive experience in delivering organisational change, building high-performance teams, and leveraging data for business insights across complex organisations, with a particular focus on sustainable and customer-centric solutions.
How is your organisation approaching data value extraction while working with legacy systems?
We're currently building a new data lakehouse on the cloud, transitioning from on-premise systems to harness cloud computing capabilities. While legacy systems sometimes get a bad reputation, they've actually been reliable workhorses for us. However, they can limit our ability to combine different datasets for richer insights.
To manage this transition effectively, we've implemented a systematic approach to understanding Data Product usage. It's really about good old-fashioned business analysis - identifying who's using what, when systems were last accessed, and for what business purposes. Sometimes we take quite a direct approach - if we can't identify anyone actively using a product, we'll simply turn it off and see if anyone raises concerns.
We recently retired Business Objects after 20 years of service, moving to Cognos. This transition required extensive analysis to understand report usage patterns, data transformation processes, and downstream impacts. While challenging, this successful migration demonstrated our ability to modernise while maintaining business continuity. The key was determining what's actually reliant on the legacy systems and overlaying that information with our future development plans.
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We've established a good network of data stewards and data owners across the organisation. Having people out in the field with that expert business knowledge has really helped with our transformation.
What strategies are you employing to ensure data quality and governance during this transformation?
We've taken several key steps to strengthen our data governance framework. First, we've implemented Informatica as our data lineage and governance tool, which helps us visualise data flows and identify quality issues like blank fields or validation needs. We've also established a robust network of data stewards and data owners across the organisation, all of whom have received specialised training.
One particularly impactful approach has been identifying data as a principal risk for the organisation. This recognition has helped motivate different departments to become more data-focused and data-driven. We're using visualisation tools like Power BI to present data in ways that make quality issues immediately apparent, allowing us to address them at the source and improve data validation at the point of entry.
A concrete example of our data quality focus is our work with email addresses. As part of our environmental initiatives to reduce paper communications, ensuring complete and accurate email records has become crucial for our digital transformation. Using Informatica, we can analyse email address completion rates and quality, directly supporting our sustainability goals while improving customer service.
How are you preparing your workforce for this data transformation?
We've launched an award-winning data academy that's putting colleagues through an eight-month programme of data fluency and literacy training. This initiative is crucial because investing in new tools and infrastructure won't deliver value if the wider organisation isn't ready to utilise them effectively. Beyond the academy, we're offering various learning pathways through our self-guided learning platform and providing opportunities for data apprenticeships. We're also working closely with partners like AWS and Pluralsight to enhance our data professionals' capabilities.
The support from our executive team has been tremendous, with significant investment in our data strategy. This backing at all levels of the organisation has been crucial in driving improvements in how we use data across the business.
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As a B Corp building society, we're keen to use location data to help people make better decisions, ensure we're reducing our carbon footprint, and supporting customers as well.
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There's been significant investment in data, and really great support at all levels of the organisation to make improvements with how we use data across the organisation.
What role do you see for location-based data in enhancing your services?
We see significant potential opportunity in leveraging location-based data to enhance our customer experience and support our sustainability initiatives. For instance, we're exploring ways we could use geospatial data to help customers make better decisions about home purchases, including assessing factors like flood risk and solar panel viability. As a B Corp building society, we're particularly interested in how location intelligence can support our environmental commitments and community engagement efforts.
We're also considering ways we could enhance our branch services using location data. With an older demographic among our customers, we want to ensure our branches remain accessible and well-utilised. We're considering how location intelligence could help in this regard and support our community initiatives, such as coffee mornings for older customers and creating child-friendly spaces in branches. This aligns perfectly with our vision of being a community asset rather than just a financial institution.
How do you envision the future of data utilisation in your organisation?
Our focus is on building common datasets in our new data ecosystem that will enable deeper insights by bringing different data sources together. We're moving towards a governed self-service model where people can create their own insights through Power BI, but in a controlled way that manages risk appropriately. This approach will not only deliver richer insights but also improve our data controls, which is crucial for us as a financial institution.
Looking ahead, we're particularly excited about the AI functionality that will be available within our tools, including Informatica, Power BI, and AWS Redshift. As we complete our new data ecosystem, we'll be well-positioned to leverage these capabilities while maintaining our commitment to responsible data management and customer service excellence. Our ultimate goal is to create a data-driven organisation that can better serve our members while upholding our values as a mutual building society.
about
Coventry Building Society
Coventry Building Society, established in 1884, stands as one of the UK's largest building societies, serving millions of members through both traditional branches and digital channels. As a mutual organization, it operates for the benefit of its members rather than shareholders, specialising in mortgages, savings accounts, and other financial services. Notable for being a B Corp building society in the UK, it combines strong financial stability with a commitment to community service and environmental sustainability.
We are the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping.
Esri UK is the exclusive provider of Esri solutions in the UK. We take a geographic approach to problem-solving, brought to life by modern GIS technology. We are committed to using science and technology to build a sustainable world.
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