SEATTLE - The 1,000 employees at BECU start their day looking at a KPI dashboard showing how strong the credit union is, even as the Washington Mutual crumbles across the street, according to Karrie Cunningham, business intelligence architect for the $8-billion credit union here.
The key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard is just one of the tools that make up the complex fabric of BECU's 9-year-old business intelligence (BI) program.
"Employees focus on what they can see," said Cunningham. "They now know what is going on across the credit union, which has resulted in better communication across the board."
The dashboard continued to deliver daily updates last month on market share, expense control, loyalty scores, efficiency ratings and membership growth as Washington Mutual customers bailed out and joined BECU, she continued. "At that time, I wished we'd had fresher data because executives wanted hourly reports. They were enjoying it."
Dashboard data is pulled every night from BECU's data warehouse, which John Richardson, IT manager, calls the single "source of truth." The warehouse runs on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with 800 gigabytes of data on storage area network (SAN) attached disks, said Cunningham.
The BI architecture also consists of the Sagent Data Flow data integration and analysis engine, which pulls the data from source systems and feeds it in readable form to the warehouse. Data Flow is also the CU's graphical report writer.
Then there's the Group 1 WebLink interface, viewed within Microsoft Internet Explorer, which allows front-end users to analyze data. Sagent and Group 1 are subsidiaries of Pitney Bowes.
The combination of technologies allows business units to access the data they need, saving IT many hours of writing SQL queries and reports to satisfy business-unit requests, said Cunningham.
Data Flow is key in meeting BECU's strategy to get a "360-degree view of the member," she said. As such, Data Flow pulls from myriad source systems at the CU, including the core processing, loan origination, member interaction tracking, member relationship management, financial services and a portion of the third-party Visa credit card.
In fact, the only systems missing from a complete quantitative view of the member are the mortgage lending platform and remaining Visa, she said. But even a complete quantitative view isn't enough: BECU is thinking about adding qualitative data to the warehouse, so that employees know whether a member would promote or detract from the credit union based on loyalty scores, said Cunningham.
"BECU is the prototype of the way Pitney Bowes is hoping to go to market," said Kyle Kittleson, director for financial services strategy, Pitney Bowes MapInfo/Group1. The BI configuration at BECU is a "synergy" that enables risk management and KPI dashboards, among other capabilities, he said.
Even small CUs could follow BECU's lead, Kittleson said. "The software bundle BECU employs is a low-cost, rapid turn-around solution that enables enterprise data integration, analytics and reporting, and it's only limited by the number of source systems plugged into it."
The Pitney Bowes MapInfo/Group 1 BI bundle offers smaller CUs a low cost/rapid turn-around solution that is flexible enough for easy customization and robust to mange extremely large transaction data volumes-with service appends for member name and address cleansing, member householding as well.
Even as IT works to deliver fresher data by improving processes and system performance, BECU seems to be an organization already firmly entrenched in BI: there are BI training classes, a user group, an advisory board and a 40% increase in "power users" over the past two years, said Cunningham. And IT is trying to lead employees into deeper water by having more of them generate their own reports in Data Flow. "We're trying to get executives more inquisitive and curious about the data," explained Richardson.
"There's a big difference between having data reported to you and having your own conversation with the data," added Cunningham.
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www.becu.org
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