BMJ Group sees immediate financial returns from the improved data dn:Director is delivering

• Creation of better market segmentation, identification of commercial opportunities, cost reduction, and cleansing and matching of data at source

Overview:

The BMJ Group Ltd is a leading global medical publisher and is a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association. Its flagship journal, BMJ (British Medical Journal), was founded in 1840 and is one of the world’s leading medical journals. The Group provides a range of evidence based medicine products, in online, mobile and print formats, and events, which combine to offer the medical community a comprehensive information support system that improves the decisions clinicians make every day. BMJ also provides research, education, news and comment, as well as online learning modules, exam preparation and revision, face to face Masterclasses and conferences to a global audience.

The Group captures and uses data for a number of specific business purposes, including commissioning,market segmentation and research, marketing activities, sales management, invoicing for subscriptions, advertising and licensing, user authentication and access control, as well as personalisation and business reporting. However, the management of so much data had become cumbersome over time, and BMJ had multiple disconnected databases storing similar data for each department’s different needs.

The Challenge:

Dirty Data in Disparate Databases “In essence, we had multiple versions of the truth,” said Phil Caisley, Head of Information Services for BMJ Group. “In particular, there were no real owners of the data, which meant there wasn’t any governance around the data either. We also lacked Master Data Management standards within and across our systems. To make matters worse, our legacy data was dirty in that it wasn’t kept current, and in many cases it was duplicated or incomplete. Because of the lack of data governance,new data was also arriving dirty into our systems. Poor source data impacts business decision making and results in poor customer facing data, which negatively impacts the personalisation of acknowledgements, invoices and content. The global nature of our business also meant that there was international variance and inconsistency in the data in terms of how it was being entered into our systems.”

Data Quality was a largely unknown concept internally. There was limited visibility and awareness of the problems, but Caisley and his team knew it was impacting decision making by creating ineffi cient processes, increasing costs, and leading to lost revenue opportunities. Data Quality issues became more visible during BMJ’s creation of a single consolidated view of the Group’s 1.8 million user and customer records sourced from multiple and geographically dispersed databases.

Latterly, Data Quality issues had a significant impact on the role out of a new authentication and access management system. The Group also wanted to expand its market reach globally, but needed better insight and business intelligence into how it was defining new markets, metrics around current market penetration, agreement on optimal sales channels for each segment, and a better understanding of the Group’s sales opportunities. Data Quality was now firmly on the radar. “Due to the data volumes concerned, we knew the internal challenges we had around the data were too great for simple manual intervention,” added Caisley. “We had four key objectives. First, to improve the currency, accuracy and completeness of the data held about the individuals and organisations that interact with BMJ Group. Second, we wanted to use this data to drive commercial returns, support personalised services, and to improve our position of influence. Third, we also wanted to effect a culture change within the organisation to recognise and realise the commercial value and business opportunities arising from the better management of this data. And fi nally, we wanted to introduce a focus on continuous process improvement of application and data development processes, as well as business processes.”

The Solution:

To achieve these objectives, Phil and his team assigned ownership and responsibility around the Group’s data, introduced data governance processes, documented and prioritised key issues, and introduced analytical skills and tools to the business, including the selection of a new data quality and data cleansing platform. “After a rigourous market evaluation, we selected and standardised on dn:Director from Datanomic,” said Caisley. “We selected dn:Director because of its rich product functionality, intuitive user interface and task focused product support. In addition, dn:Director was able to process international data from geographically dispersed systems, including non-Latin and non-English names and addresses, which will be critical to us supporting and expanding our global presence.

We expect to identify significant commercial opportunities by using dn:Director to enrich our data using third-party data sources and then using this enriched data for market segmentation and sales channel identification. Moving forward, we’ll also be using dn:Director for real-time data cleansing at source to reduce the impact of data quality issues on downstream decision making.”

The Benefit:

The BMJ Group was trained in dn:Director in January 2009 and went live a month later in February. “We achieved immediate business process improvement from the improved data that dn:Director is delivering for us, which has reduced the impact on our customer service team freeing up internal resource,” concluded Caisley. “As a result of Datanomic, we are improving the quality of the data used for business development and operational decision making. We have standardised on dn:Director to cleanse, match and enhance our data to improve and enrich our single customer view. dn:Director will underpin our global expansion strategy being used to improve customer and prospect data, allowing us to better segment markets, identify commercial opportunities and reduce our internal costs.”