Pomerol Partners releases white paper on how to enhance front office analytics

Pomerol Partners, a business intelligence consultancy that specialises in advanced data visualisations, has released a white paper that aims to help sell-side institutions entangle the complexity of their IT infrastructures.

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HEDGEWEEK

09 December 2014

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The central premise, in this age of big data, is that by removing the historical silo-based approach to data management, front office teams should be absorbing data from all facets of the organisation, which can lead to unexpected insights and potentially gaining a competitive edge.

“The single largest challenge these institutions face is trusting their data. Very few business decision makers have the luxury of transparent and instant access to their own business logic and data. This causes senior executives to request information in a shot gun type approach to their business managers, finance, risk and operational functions – who all produce distinct versions of their view of the “truth”,” says Fred Hefer (pictured), co-founder of Pomerol.

The reactive iteration stage comprises three steps:

• Visualisation
• Transformation
• Infrastructure

Visualisation means looking at all data available and putting a spotlight on the bad data. Once firms can see and understand the flaws of their data, the remediation of those flaws will lead to front office teams starting to trust the data more.

“The analogy I like to use is the Rubik’s Cube with all the colours mixed up. What we do is take clients through the process of realigning all their data – getting the colours of each block to match – to transform their data infrastructure,” says David van Rooyen, another of Pomerol’s co-founders.

A key point that the guide makes is that during the second step – Transformation – a “dashboard champion” is embedded into the front office. Crucially, this should not be an IT professional but a business intelligence expert that can direct the IT team on data flow, much like an air traffic controller.

“The dashboard champion should hopefully use the dashboards to make better trades, save costs etc. That then creates appetite among their colleagues to start using the dashboards. Once that widespread adoption of the dashboards has been achieved, trust starts to build, firms own the business intelligence and this transforms the infrastructure,” says Hefer.

Pomerol Partners refer to ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) technology as one of the possible options firms could use as a way to align disparate data sets. This can then provide a more complete picture of a firm’s operations, from which commercial insights can be gleaned.

“By accessing different sources of data on the same client it drives better decision making. But you have to make sure that the information on that client is accurate – which is where the ETL technology comes into play,” says van Rooyen.

Once better analytics has begun to transform the IT infrastructure, firms then have the ability to complete the final stage of the reactive iteration, which is to “challenge” the infrastructure. What Pomerol means here is that the front office regains and retains ownership of their business logic and data rather than assigning it to the IT department.

Having transformed and challenged the data infrastructure to become bigger, better and faster, firms will be better placed to handle big data and even begin to avail of predictive analytical technologies.

“Our white paper attempts to show firms how to fix their technology. To achieve the transformation in their infrastructure so that they can make proactive decisions rather than being reactive,” concludes Hefer.

To read the guide in full, please click here