Super funds can suffer from patchwork data strategies

One of the main goals for a superannuation fund when implementing a data strategy is to make sure there will be one "source of truth" across the fund's entire operations.

Speaking at an International Business Review webinar, James Milne, AlphaCert head of product, said he often encountered organisations with no fundamental agreement on the source of truth for data, which created mismatched datasets across the business.

“It might be that one team recognises a particular source and a particular couple of data points within that is the source of truth and they’re basing their market values or their numbers of those,” Milne said.

After getting everyone on the same page, Milne said the next step toward fixing data solutions for super funds was to sort where organisational data came from, how it was defined and catalogued and find out who was responsible for the data.

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Then it was important for there to be a strong commitment from the top of the organisation to get the right data maintenance teams, staff training and governance frameworks.

Milne described an adequate data model as a self-servicing one that had one trusted source of underlying data.

“That really allows the scalability of those data requirements out to the business and that can be delivered via BI tools [data reporting tools], or other specialist tools as well,” Milne said.